Augmented reality (AR) helps users understand things more easily and communicate faster by overlapping virtual digital content with the real world. This article introduces AR Guidance from HD Hyundai Infracore and explores how they’ve adopted AR for the maintenance of construction machinery.When complex construction machinery breaks down, AR Guidance can be used to easily identify the problem. Using floor augmentation, objects can be brought up to troubleshoot data for the equipment. The content provided in apps can be used on devices like smartphones and tablets. It is the first AR solution of its kind in the construction machinery industry.Discover how HD Hyundai Infracore’s Global Product Support team uses Unity for troubleshooting.In 2019, HD Hyundai Infracore collected equipment requirements and feedback through interviews with product owners. As they sought to find a way to fulfill their clients’ needs, they planned various service solutions in combination with IT in the service sector. One of these solutions was to use AR to bring up 3D modeling so that clients could easily identify equipment data.They decided to make content that combined modeling with the details of the troubleshooting guide. This content provides users with the basic shape of the equipment and tells them which procedure they should follow to solve their problem.1) Dealer: The dealer that contracts equipment and maintenance (relevant region)2) Service staff: Dealer equipment service staffThe inner workings of construction machinery consist of a complex series of wires, hydraulic hoses, and pipelines, making them difficult to understand. Identifying a point of failure can therefore be very time-consuming. Internal experts were able to understand the inside of the equipment and components through 3D equipment modeling; however, the dealers and service staff had limited access and could not utilize the data.For example, the equipment mainly consists of hydraulics, a circuit diagram of electrical systems, and a block diagram of the engine. The dealer service staff can check the .dwg-based system circuit diagram to identify the structure and logic of the equipment, but even when they figure out the logic through the structure of the circuit diagram, it still takes time to locate major components in the actual equipment. It takes even longer for new service staff.Dealers needed a way for service staff to quickly provide professional services, while service staff needed content that could help them understand equipment data more intuitively than previous text-based service materials. A solution that lets users obtain the data they need and learn from experiences with ease was required.During AR Guidance test operations, content was checked for basic elements, such as displaying major component locations and features that provide detailed data on components.Many popular games use AR, but there were not as many cases where Unity was adopted in the construction machinery market. However, it soon became clear that HD Hyundai Infracore could easily start a project in Unity using various materials, including data provided by creators, tutorials from Unity, manuals, and more.Upon examining various use cases, it became clear that Unity’s real-time 3D technology could be used across many industries outside of gaming. Most notably, it could be used in the construction machinery industry.AR Guidance consists of two models: Guidance and 3D Model Viewer.AR Guidance displays 3D models of the equipment and offers users a guide for equipment troubleshooting with industrial augmented reality. Users can check and troubleshoot equipment problems on their own using three methods.Sensor Signal Monitoring: Identifies the equipment statusTroubleshooting: Provides causes and troubleshooting guides for defects with fault codesPerformance Test Guide: Offers a guide to measure whether the equipment’s performance is adequate and sends performance values after the equipment has been fixed3D Model Viewer, which does not use AR technology, provides simple control over 3D modeling and provides access to more data by associating the system circuit diagram with each component in the following stages. The goal of this is to help those who are new to the service use 3D product visualization to easily understand the equipment.The first step was to identify which content was the most useful to users in order to efficiently solve their needs. Unity’s training programs, as well as those from the Gyeonggi Content Agency, were used to ensure that users were equipped with the tools and knowledge they needed to be successful.When implementing the Sensor Signal Monitoring system, it was important to categorize and select data, as importing too much data from the equipment to show the location and status values via 3D modeling could cause problems.There was a constant need for a mobile-based diagnosis program, as all equipment diagnosis programs were developed for Windows. HD Hyundai Infracore thought importing Sensor Signal Monitoring, one of the features of the Windows-based diagnosis program, and showing it with the augmented 3D modeling of the equipment, could clearly provide the users with equipment status information.The 3D modeling data was removed from the 3D Product Data Management (PDM), keeping only the minimum required to deliver equipment information. HD Hyundai Infracore also worked to reduce the volume of redundant data imported from each piece of content by structuring it.The troubleshooting guide provides detailed information about the connector PIN number, color, flow chart, and more. It does so according to the occurrence of fault codes by using 3D modeling along with the shape of wires and connectors. The development of this content has contributed to establishing content standards for wiring troubleshooting for fault codes.Because construction machinery usually works in harsh environments, it was important to ensure that the 3D models were stable enough to accurately check equipment data using the AR technology. The aim was to compose one-source, multi-use content in relatively small volumes and increase the speed of data download and execution.Performance tests need to be conducted for all equipment operations to accurately verify repairs. Many variables, including weather and operator controlling methods, make it difficult to extract precise data. To combat this, HD Hyundai Infracore have provided guides that make it simpler to extract accurate equipment performance data using 3D modeling.Positive user feedback For AR Guidance, usability and stability were key. A simple structure was chosen to enable users to easily access equipment data. Capacity was also minimized in order to ensure stable app usage based on the usage environments of users.As a result, HD Hyundai Infracore received many positive reviews and valuable feedback after the launch of the beta version of AR Guidance for European service staff. This included a request to implement content for main component data, which later became a stepping stone for the development of 3D Model Viewer content.A new perspective on construction machinery manufacturers AR Guidance has played a part in changing the perceptions of technical support services for construction machinery. HD Hyundai Infracore goes beyond traditional services, offering a variety of digital services and providing technical support as a premium service strategy. They enhanced client satisfaction and improved their corporate image by providing more innovative digital services with their AR Guidance solution.Effective problem solving AR Guidance helps reduce service time by allowing staff to more easily identify fault data. It also effectively reduces communication time for equipment fault data because headquarters can support problems not directly solved by the dealer service.The future of AR Guidance and AR construction The first objective is to increase the usage rate of global service staff to more than 80%. In order to do this, the expansion of target equipment implementation should be prioritized, as not all equipment sold globally is currently available in the construction management app. It will also be important to quantify service lead time and verify the reduction in communication.Mobile devices were the easiest to interact with, so they were the first to be integrated. HD Hyundai Infracore aims to adopt AR glasses next in order to increase the usability of AR Guidance. They will then begin developing VR-based content alongside their AR-based content. VR solutions will be used to guide regular equipment inspections and correct equipment operations before and after sales.HD Hyundai Infracore also plans to increase equipment uptime by reducing service time with the troubleshooting guide within AR Guidance. The adoption of AR glasses will enable hands-free use during maintenance and repairs.The role of Unity is crucial in the process. They allowed HD Hyundai Infracore to overcome many of the challenges they faced through support, online resources, and the Unity creator communities.AR Guidance is growing with HD Hyundai Infracore. The generation of construction machinery changes in accordance with exhaustive regulations. HD Hyundai Infracore is steadily developing equipment for the new generation and AR Guidance content will continuously be developed for that equipment as well. Usability is expected to be increased by providing troubleshooting guides through AR Guidance as new generations are introduced. HD Hyundai Infracore is developing next-generation equipment, which will be implemented with AR Guidance and see continuous development."With each new release of construction machinery equipment, the content and UI will undergo significant changes. As before, by utilizing Unity's rapid support and various platforms, it will be possible to create content that suits the new generation of equipment and quickly meets customer needs."- Ingeun Lee, Senior Manager of HD Hyundai Infracore

With a rich history rooted in superior engine performance, most know the BMW brand as being synonymous with an elevated driving experience. As the BMW Group has also been known for pioneering digital innovations in the automotive industry in the past decade, it should come as no surprise that in the last several years, the research team at BMW Group has been leading the charge when it comes to finding ways to bring augmented reality technology to their vehicles. We sat down with research engineers Manfred Pauli and Wolfgang Haberl to discuss their vision for the future of driving and how BMW is innovating the in-vehicle experience with augmented reality (AR). Which teams or business units at BMW are currently utilizing Unity?Manfred: We are a part of the BMW Group research team. We build early prototypes, and provide a lookout for future generations of BMW vehicles. Unity is used throughout the company, especially for designing head-up display graphics or developing graphics prototypes.How does this new prototype for a head-up display work? What are the current capabilities when it comes to using AR to build a new driver experience?Wolfgang: In this case, it is an AR glasses display, so it has some similarities to the head-up system. We try to see what the specifics for AR glasses are and where they make sense in addition to a traditional head-up display. Our current prototype includes some driver and some passenger-related use cases to demonstrate the range of possibilities. For the driver, we have driver assistance augmentation. You see, for example, assisting graphical distance representations during parking, you have your navigation arrows that guide you exactly along the road and the intersections where you have to turn. It also highlights other things, like markers for potholes and construction sites, as well as some signage that you might overlook, like a speed limit or pedestrian crossing. All that information is brought into your central view in AR. For the passenger, we are really trying to explore what might be a nice usage of time in the car. We have implemented a gaming example that allows you to collect coins that appear along the driving route in order to gain points. We also have a feature that lets you use the glasses as your personal movie theater.Can you speak about what goals you are ultimately trying to achieve by bringing AR to drivers? You touched on safety and navigation, as well as the overall driving experience and making it more immersive. What do you hope to see?Manfred: BMW is, as you know, not a manufacturer of AR glasses. So, what we want to do is enable the customer to be able to connect their existing AR glasses that they already use outside of the car. The overall goal is to make any set of AR glasses work inside the car, as we have done with the smartphone. There are already a multitude of AR apps, but what is on the market right now doesn’t work during a drive because the car and head both move. The devices have to be able to differentiate between these movements, but to our knowledge, none of the glasses manufacturers can do the necessary 6 degrees-of-freedom (6-dof) tracking without additional data from the car yet. We have developed our own glasses tracking algorithm, software, and vehicle interface so that we can enable glasses to work inside the car. That is the first step.Wolfgang: Getting this basic system to work has taken up a lot of our time over the past years. This tracking solution enables us to place stable augmentations while the car is moving. Now we are able to put virtual assets on the dashboard that follow the movements of the car. At the same time, we can place signage or markers on the road or on a building in your surroundings that are independent of the movements of the car or the user’s head.We are prototyping different use cases to see what makes sense and what is helpful for the driver. Of course, it is always about creating content that will make driving safer. We are trying to see what we can display to reduce your cognitive load when you have the augmentation right in front of you. We test these features with test drivers in our simulator to study whether their reaction times get better when wearing the glasses compared to using a classic cockpit.Will AR glasses be complementary to what you're seeing in the head-up display or is it basically the same information?Wolfgang: We think that current AR glasses could be a great extension to a regular head-up system. The head-up display provides important information that is not world-locked, like vehicle speed, turn-by-turn navigation, and the current speed limit. It is always available, no matter whether you’re weaning the glasses or not. The glasses provide a huge field of view, significantly larger than the image sizes of any head-up displays. This allows coverage of a good portion of the real world with augmentations, thus extending the traditional head-up.Let's talk a bit more broadly about the auto industry and general AR adoption. As you said, this is all in early development. What do you think the current state is for most manufacturers, and what are you, as BMW, and others prioritizing as you move toward this?Wolfgang: From what we see on the market, a lot of companies are currently integrating AR features into their existing head-up systems, which from our point of view makes a lot of sense. At the same time, these solutions are still limited to the smaller field of view of the head-up system. That’s why we put a lot of effort into AR glasses to see how they could make use of the remaining field of view. We have the only system right now, which works with a small pair of AR glasses that are really ergonomic and provide a compelling form factor and design (the Xreal Air 2). We have put a lot of development effort into getting the tracking to work on a customer- friendly device.We hope more companies that produce glasses will cooperate with us and make their glasses compatible with our vehicles. In the future, we expect glasses to be as ubiquitous as smartphones. We want to set an industry standard with our integration in order to provide a common ground for glasses manufacturers and car manufacturers to have a working platform independent of a certain combination of glasses and car brands.Manfred: We went public with a different pair of glasses in 2014. We used ODG smart glasses, and if you compare those to the ones we’re using now, a lot has changed. The field of view has almost doubled, and image quality has improved a lot. In addition, we can now use Unity. We are really glad to see this technology mature and are proud of our work.What limitations around driver safety, consumer expectations, or hardware are you considering when you think about the next phase of this?Wolfgang: From a consumer’s point of view, we want glasses to get even smaller in order to increase wearability and comfort. Most of the current devices are targeted towards indoor use and have a very little tint. So, if you’re driving outside in the sun, the tint might not be dark enough to see the displayed content. On the other hand, if you’re driving at night, you don’t need any tint at all. Consequently, dynamic tinting is a desirable feature. At the same time, you need a very good display that provides a broad range of brightness to achieve convincing image quality even in bright sunlight.Many of these glasses are also battery-powered, so they have a limited runtime. Of course, we also provide the most important driving information in one of the car’s built-in displays for safety reasons. Still, we hope to see runtimes increase for longer drives.We are able to merge the separate display areas of our different systems in the car to avoid overlap. With our tracking system, we know exactly where the glasses are looking, and we also know where the area for the head-up system and other displays are. So, we can omit putting items in the glasses on top of other displays, giving us the possibility to run them in parallel.What are your hopes for BMW’s role in the development of this technology?Manfred: BMW was the first to introduce the head-up display technology, inspired by the aviation industry. So what's next after head-up? We are launching a completely new user interface with the BMW Panoramic Vision in series vehicles starting in 2025. The whole width of the windshield is then used for display, pillar-to-pillar. We are always thinking about what’s next. We want to point out the huge benefit of AR glasses in the car. Our main goal is creating maximum safety in combination with sheer driving pleasure. BMW drivers are not distracted but intuitively supported in their driving task, resulting in additional excitement.Wolfgang: We believe an important step is creating a standard for car integration with more glasses manufacturers and to keep improving it. From a customer’s perspective, their glasses should simply work in their car, independent of the respective manufacturers.When it came to building this, how did you make the decision to choose Unity? How does Unity fit into your current development workflows?Wolfgang: Most of the companies offering AR glasses on the market right now support Unity. Today, the Unity Engine is the de facto standard for AR glasses. It definitely made the most sense for us to go with Unity for this reason.Manfred: The Unity Asset Store was another added benefit. The map plugins from Infinity Code were a huge help in developing navigation features. We had designers working on the prototype that would bring in assets from Blender, and then we integrated them into the Unity editor and deployed them through our Android devices. From everything around recording routes with our cars and simulation, Unity has been a very customizable tool that helped us out a lot.Wolfgang: We know that a lot of times, technical research projects are hard to convey or explain to non-experts and sometimes also to decision makers. We always try to implement use cases and great visualizations to transport the idea and the vision of the final customer product. Unity was a great help with abstracting away from all the low-level problems of getting the visualizations displayed in the desired way. This made our whole vision a lot more understandable and really fascinated people. It allowed them to see how cool and immersive the future of AR glasses in vehicles could be.Want to hear more about this exciting project? Join our deep dive session with BMW at Unite 2024 in Barcelona.Explore the possibilities of Unity for automotive, or contact us for more information.

There’s never been a better time to pursue a career in real-time 3D (RT3D). Across industries as diverse as gaming, architecture, automotive, medicine, aerospace, and film, new and lucrative career opportunities are emerging for the next generation of real-time developers, programmers, and artists.However, despite the RT3D boom, preparing for these new roles and navigating a hiring environment that’s rapidly shifting can be challenging for everyone involved. How are job seekers to know which skills they’ll need for which positions, and how best to get themselves up to speed? How should educators adapt their teaching so it stays relevant? And, how can employers more easily identify and onboard the very best candidates for increasingly specific roles?Unity’s latest initiative, Elevate, is here to address these challenges by transforming the way job seekers, educators, and employers interact within the dynamic RT3D landscape. Elevate’s mission is to equip job seekers with the knowledge they need to prepare for and secure opportunities in RT3D sectors, while also providing educators and employers with resources to streamline the talent cultivation and hiring cycle.Introducing Universal Job ProfilesAt the core of the Elevate initiative are Universal Job Profiles (UJPs) – meticulously crafted guidebooks designed to eliminate the guesswork and inconsistencies plaguing RT3D job definitions. UJPs are industry-vetted, detailed overviews of specified roles within RT3D industries. UJPs serve as comprehensive manuals detailing vital job elements such as role responsibilities, how positions fit within a studio structure, core skill requirements, commonly used tools, application prerequisites, interview processes, and learning resources. In essence, UJPs outline clear and structured career pathways tailored specifically to various roles within RT3D industries.The Employer Advisory BoardThe creation and refinement of UJPs is overseen by Elevate’s Employer Advisory Board (EAB), a diverse collective of experts representing industry-leading companies from all parts of the real-time landscape. These industry leaders provide nuanced insights and feedback, ensuring the UJPs accurately reflect current and emergent RT3D employment trends. The EAB’s advice guarantees that the information within the job profiles accurately reflects industry requirements, equipping both job seekers and educators with the most relevant and actionable information.Streamlining the path to employmentFor aspiring professionals, UJPs act as a map to plan their career trajectory clearly and confidently. These profiles guide job seekers through the landscape of RT3D industries, ensuring that by the time they complete the recommended areas of study, they emerge as job-ready candidates. The UJPs’ actionable checkpoints allow individuals to track progress and acquire skills pertinent to their desired roles.Enabling educators to craft future-ready curriculaEducation institutions are often challenged by the rapid pace of technological advancement in RT3D industries. Elevate alleviates this strain by providing educators with up-to-date UJPs, enabling the design of curricula that are synchronized with the market’s demands. UJPs aid educators in crafting learning experiences that align with real-world expectations, ultimately leading to a classroom-to-career transition that is smooth and successful. Empowering Employers to find the best talentEmployers also reap the benefits of UJPs by using them as benchmarks for job listings and candidate evaluations. In-depth overviews of roles facilitate a more efficient hiring process, helping employers find the best match for their team quickly. Employers seeking to influence the evolution of UJPs can also join the EAB, contributing to the program’s future direction and maintaining the initiative’s industry-leading status.A collective effort for an inclusive futureThe Elevate program is an ambitious and inclusive endeavor. It transcends tool preferences and industry segments, offering visibility and access to everyone interested in RT3D opportunities. Unity is committed to broadening the path to success in RT3D industries for all, and Elevate stands testament to that commitment.Discover the full scope of the Elevate program and how it can transform your journey in the RT3D industry by visiting the Elevate landing page. Whether you’re a job seeker, educator, or employer, become a part of this groundbreaking initiative and contribute to shaping the future of our industry. With Elevate, we’re not just finding jobs; we’re elevating careers.

Partnering with a strong mediation provider has never been more important. As the shift to bidding and mounting privacy regulations present challenges for app publishers, using a mediation that can boost your business across both monetization and user acquisition is critical. In 2024, LevelPlay is releasing significant product updates designed to help you drive more revenue, connect with high-quality users, and streamline the experience from game creation to growth. The combined updates will be transformational, making the ad mediation an all-new LevelPlay.In the first phase, LevelPlay has already released support for a dedicated package in the Unity Editor Package Manager. This powers a dramatically easier integration process that is only available for Unity LevelPlay, simplifying mediation setup to enable Unity developers to start monetizing faster. Developers will be able to complete their mediation integration in the same place they build their games, with the LevelPlay integration a native part of Unity developers’ workflow. The package also reduces overhead for publishers by enabling them to upgrade their SDK without being required to update the whole Unity package.But that’s not all. Over the coming months we’re releasing a series of additional product launches designed to maximize app growth and simplify growth management from every angle.Upcoming phases of the roll-out include:Major upgrades to network UA tech. Powered by a new generation of machine learning tech, the Unity Ads and ironSource Ads networks now make LevelPlay publishers’ UA more impactful than ever. Publishers who run automated ROAS campaigns are already seeing meaningful uplift in both scale and quality on both networks, and additional optimizations will be released on a rolling basis through the rest of the year.Multiple ad units. Publishers will be able to load multiple ad units simultaneously, which means they can create a dynamic waterfall setup and customize the waterfall by in-app placement. This gives publishers more control over their ad strategy with additional ways to optimize for key metrics like latency and ARPDAU.One home for Unity growth data. We’re centralizing data from Unity’s leading growth solutions into a new platform homepage, giving publishers an instant snapshot of the health of their app portfolio in one clear view. This new page will allow publishers to view UA and revenue data side-by-side, compare performance over set time periods, monitor their brand safety, and see combined network performance for Unity Ads and ironSource Ads. In addition to the two networks, the homepage will include LevelPlay and Ad Quality data, with Aura and Tapjoy Offerwall data coming next.Platform experience revamp. We’re also updating our platform UX to make it simpler than ever to grow your game. It’ll take fewer steps to manage and optimize your ad strategy with smoother functionality and greater ease-of-use. The platform revamp will be wrapped up in a new UI reflecting Unity’s look and feel for an even more seamless flow from game creation to growth.Stay tuned on the Unity Grow LinkedIn page and your email inbox for ongoing announcements.

Compared to traditional waterfall instances, in-app bidding can be advantageous. However one concern raised within the context of in-app bidding is the loss of manual tweaks to fill ad requests. Given the automation with in-app bidding, it can raise concerns about losing control and transparency.To help mitigate concerns around moving to in-app bidding, there are tools and services that help you maintain transparency and control. This article looks at three key pillars to addressing those concerns: testing, granular reporting, and understanding your ad experiences.Maintain control through robust testingIn the automated in-app bidding environment, you need to be able to test, learn, and adapt ad strategies to see long-term success. A/B testing gives you greater understanding of your monetization metrics, from average revenue per user (ARPU) to retention. Knowledge is power, and A/B testing is the only way you can truly measure the impact of different in-app bidding strategies. Running an A/B test can give you the answers you need to feel secure in this new landscape.Certain KPIs you can look at to help determine success could be: overall average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU), ARPU growth, increase in the number of impressions per user, and fewer managed instances. Tracking ARPDAU before and after you implement bidding measures overall revenue, not just performance by network.In addition, A/B testing gives you granular insights into your strategy so that you can continue to optimize and build a dynamic marketplace in this new ecosystem. Unity LevelPlay has a robust A/B testing solution that allows you to test a wide range of variables including bidding vs. traditional waterfalls, mediation groups, new networks, instance pricing, and ad strategy. Among LevelPlay customers who A/B tested integrating the Unity Ads bidder, the test group won in 78% of the cases, and those who applied the changes saw ad ARPDAU increases of up to 7%.Overall, A/B testing brings you peace of mind when transitioning to an in-app bidding world, confirming the switch is right for your app. After switching, a robust A/B testing tool continues to give you control over the bidding environment, allowing you to test and implement new optimizations.Learn more about A/B testing.Gain transparency with deeper reportingHaving transparency into your ad performance can help you make informed changes to accelerate your app’s growth. In-app bidding is an automated setup which will run based on general best practices, so the ability to make real-time, data-informed choices for your app is incredibly valuable, giving you a leg up on competitors.Features such as real-time pivot from LevelPlay provide granular visibility into monetization performance and the ability to make instant changes. Publishers can detect performance changes as they occur, compare revenue over time, and analyze network performance. Trackable KPIs such as eCPM buckets, ad latency, impressions, DAU, DEU, and sessions per DEU can help publishers understand not only ad performance, but user engagement patterns as well. These metrics can be sliced and diced by country, time, ad source, and more to give a deeper level of insight to determine what, if any, changes are needed.“In 2024, Unity LevelPlay remains focused on giving developers more control and transparency through granular analytics that provide actionable data in real time, to help optimize their monetization strategies and maintain user experience to drive higher retention and ARPU,” Omer Adato, Senior Director of Product Management at Unity says.Experience ads as your users doAnother concern raised is that since in-app bidding operates in real time and your ad space can be filled quite quickly without you even knowing, having transparency into the ads being shown in your app is key to ensuring you’re selling ad space to advertisers that won’t disrupt the user experience. After all, seeing a frustrating ad or having a glitchy experience can quickly cause users to churn. However you can gain insight that supports both brand and safety as well as revenue.Gaining oversight of your users' ad experiences supports not only branding and safety, but revenue as well. By blocking troublesome ads initially, you cultivate a healthier ecosystem until networks address issues. Once resolved, lifting blocks on revenue sources restores income while maintaining a quality user experience. Overall, targeted blocking and unblocking empowers monetization through cooperation on ad quality.Ad Quality from LevelPlay is designed to give full transparency into your ad experience. You can access a gallery of all the ads shown in your app, ad analysis, and user journeys. Publishers can also define a set of triggers in Ad Quality, called custom notifications. This feature proactively alerts publishers if a specific creative, advertiser, content rating, or buggy ad appears in your app, so that you can immediately respond to any critical needs.While in-app bidding is running automatically in the background, a feature like Ad Quality gives you much needed transparency into how your ad space is being filled.“Ad Quality helps us ensure that ad content in our apps is appropriate for our audiences. We get notified when titles with high content ratings are displayed, so we know when to reach out to the networks. This visibility is key for us.”-- Stefano Accossato, Head of UA & Ad Monetization at TutoTOONSIn an in-app bidding environment, working with a mediation platform that has the right features to maintain control and transparency over your ad strategy can help make the transition from traditional waterfalls easier and help create a top performing ad strategy.Learn more about Unity LevelPlay and how you can get started with A/B testing, Real time pivot, and Ad Quality.

App marketers now have more capabilities than ever before to reach new audiences. Yet, despite the wealth of options available, many app marketers choose to rely solely on social ad networks (SANs) for their user acquisition (UA) efforts.This is in part because many app marketers believe that SANs are sufficient for effective UA. But, this misses the significant impact that SDK networks can offer apps in terms of scale, optimizations, and resilience. All of which is left behind when marketers choose to only utilize SANs.Here we’ll address the reasons app marketers should be leveraging SDK networks, as well as the common misconceptions that lead app marketers not to do so, and the impactful resources left on the table when choosing not to diversify UA marketing channels.Capturing untapped growth opportunitiesScalability is the measure of app success, and effective scaling requires access to as wide a pool of users who can be converted as possible. While there’s no doubt that social ad networks offer substantial growth opportunities, they are not, or even close to, the totality of the market.In other words, limiting marketing channels to SANs means losing out on the untapped scale that is available through SDK networks, and as a consequence limiting your app's growth potential. Using SDK networks in tandem with SANs mitigates this loss of scale.Resiliency to market and channel policy changesExpanding beyond social networks also has the added benefit of resiliency to market and channel policy changes.SANs operate under a set of requirements different from SDK networks, needing to conform to standards unique to them. While your app may be currently compliant with these guidelines, they continue to evolve and update. When changed, your app would need to quickly adapt or stop running UA. Diversifying your marketing mix enables you to create a buffer with additional avenues for growth.And that’s just at the regulatory level. On a business level, the companies behind these social networks frequently change their policies. A change in policy could mean extensive work to meet the new requirements, which could then result in a loss of growth. By adding SDK networks to your marketing mix you can create a more resilient UA strategy that isn’t totally reliant on one set of policies that are subject to change.A bigger toolbox for optimizationsA significant benefit to a diverse UA marketing mix is having multiple processes for reaching high-quality users. Each SDK and SAN has its optimizations for finding you the right user for your app. But, with differing solutions come differing results. This is a weakness when marketing channels are siloed from one another, or used in isolation. However, used as a part of a comprehensive and diverse marketing strategy, this means you get access to more tools to reach high-quality users at the right price.Each network prioritizes users differently. So while SANs may miss the users you actually want, SDK networks could help you fill in those gaps, and vice versa. The larger your toolbox of algorithmic solutions, the better you can optimize and the more likely you’ll be able to find the right users for your app.Common misconceptions: Implementing SDK networksWhile there are many clear upsides to integrating SDK networks into your UA mix, some app marketers have been reluctant to do so. A large part of this reluctance is connected to the higher investment needed, both in terms of personnel and capital. But, this reluctance is for the most part based on two common misconceptions:Misconception 1: SDK network implementation and optimization is highly manualA common myth around SDK network integration and optimization is that it requires a lot of manual management in order to drive results. While this was true in the past, the industry has since become far more efficient and automation driven. This is particularly true for optimizations.Thanks to advancements like automated bid optimizers, much of the manual heavy lifting has been taken out of the equation. The ironSource Ads tCPA optimizer, for example, uses machine learning functions to optimize bids based on certain actions. In the past, this would all be done manually, but it’s now a streamlined process that only requires the setting of which action and price you wish to optimize for.Misconception 2: ROAS is difficult to solve forAn important metric for utilizing SDK networks successfully is return on ad spend (ROAS). This is the measure of revenue generated in relation to the cost of running the campaign. To effectively leverage SDK networks, app marketers need to know what ROAS goal they should be solving for. Without it, spending could exceed revenue, meaning that your UA could cost you more than it earns you.A common concern is that efficient ROAS is tough to identify and that generating a reliable ROAS benchmark requires a deep understanding of SDK networks and their optimizations. While this was historically the case, the industry has evolved to account for this difficulty. Most SDK networks offer account managers to assist marketers in calculating their ideal ROAS. Plus, solving for ROAS is now an established science - with the correct formulas and tools, it’s now far easier.Diversify your marketing mix for better UA performance and more resiliencyWhile SANs offer performance and scale and should be a part of your UA channels, there is significantly greater growth potential in adding SDK networks into your marketing mix. On top of this, having a diverse marketing mix gives your app a more resilient UA strategy that can adapt to changing policies, both on the regulatory and business levels. Combined with easily accessible automated optimizers and comprehensive account management, app marketers can now easily integrate SDK networks into their marketing mix for a more diverse and efficient UA strategy.Let’s get you started. Talk to a Unity account manager today.

ATT and cookie deprecation signifies more than just a technological shift - it's a game-changer for marketers who are looking to reach engaged consumers where they are spending the most time. So how can marketers adapt their mobile advertising strategy and continue to ensure they reach their consumers where they are?In short, as the mobile advertising landscape changes, so should the way advertisers run digital campaigns. Let's break down how advertisers adapt their mobile strategy accordingly (spoiler: all signs point to in-app advertising where more than half of users are still addressable.)Brief history of privacy changes on mobileTraditionally, to advertise on web browsers or apps, marketers have utilized cookies and mobile ad IDs (MAIDs). That means marketers utilize unique user identifiers for tracking, retargeting, frequency capping, audience segmentation, and attribution. But following privacy changes over time, addressability has become significantly more challenging.September 2017: Apple released ITP 1.0 to limit the use of cookies on Safari and prevent cross-site tracking.May 2018: The GDPR became applicable in the EU.January 2020: CCPA gave California residents rights over their personal information.April 2021: Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency (ATT) on iOS.2024: Chrome plans to disable third-party cookies for all of their users. They’ve already started with 1% of their global users, and plan to expand to 100% of users by Q3. You know the history. Now, here are some tips for tailoring your mobile strategy to maximize your impact with both addressable users, users who have a unique identifier, and non-addressable users, users who do not have a unique identifier.Addressability strategy of advertisers in the industryHere are some commonly used practices that marketers use to get ahead of their competitors before the last cookie falls.Embrace first party data: Without third-party cookies, first-party data has a key role to play. Marketers invest extensive resources in building user trust, encouraging opt-ins, and building a robust data infrastructure.Collaborate with industry players to explore alternative ID solutions: Some marketers explore alternative methods to cookies and consider testing with partners like The Trade Desk or Liveramp, who offer other ID solutions to address these cookie-based challenges.Optimize in-app advertising: Mobile users only spend 10% of their time on web, so 90% of mobile time is spent in-app, particularly social media and gaming apps. The best part: the majority of supply in apps is still addressable. Marketers are optimizing in-app strategy with more personalized ad experiences, retargeting, audience segmentation, and strategic placements to engage users. Getting even more granular, let’s discuss how marketers can better understand non-addressable users.How advertisers segment non-addressable usersNon-addressable users are still very valuable - marketers are getting more innovative with how they market to them. While marketers may not be able to get specific-user level information, some contextual data is still available:Contextual information: The type of content users are engaging with (e.g. what they are reading, mobile games they are playing, how long they’re engaging with this content, how the app is rated, etc.) Contextual demographic information: General demographic information can be inferred based on the content users are engaging withTechnical device information: Device type, model, OS, connectivityGeographic location: Country, city, time of dayBy adapting to this constantly-evolving advertising landscape, you can continue to make sure you’re in the best position for growth - just make sure you’re using the right approach. And with users spending 5 hours a day on their mobile devices and 90% of that time happening in-app according to data.ai - building a comprehensive mobile strategy is crucial to long term brand success.That’s why it’s also essential to have the right partners - and at Unity, we can help connect you with premium demand sources, offer full data transparency, and much more.Get started with Unity’s programmatic solutions and get ahead of the game.

Unity is excited to announce its expansion in the European (EMEA) market for its Programmatic Exchange, following four years of exponential growth for direct brand and agency sales in North America .Growing Opportunities for European AdvertisersMany of the largest brands in Europe are already utilizing supply from both the Unity and ironSource Exchanges on the open market, indicating the significant value the supply holds for European advertisers. In fact, Unity has established preferred supply partner relationships with major agency holding companies, laying a solid foundation for its expansion into Europe. By establishing direct relationships, Unity can now better support global brands' marketing efforts and drive mutual success in the EMEA market.In addition to existing partnerships and supply relationships, Unity is excited to introduce our programmatic solutions and support to EMEA brands and agencies. Leading the charge for our work in sales in the EMEA market will be Katya Kornilova. With her proven track record in the mobile gaming and programmatic industry, Kornilova will spearhead the initiative to establish and nurture direct relationships with brands and agencies across the European market, further solidifying Unity's commitment to delivering unparalleled support and innovation.Commitment to Programmatic ExcellenceAs part of our expansion strategy, select demand partners connected with the ironSource and Unity Exchanges can now receive consent signals, per IAB's Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) 2.2. By supporting the transmission of TCF consent signals, Unity reaffirms its dedication to supporting demand partners in their efforts to comply with data protection regulations for a more ethical, sustainable advertising ecosystem.Unity's expansion into the EMEA market signifies more than just a geographical growth; it represents a commitment to redefining the future of mobile gaming and programmatic advertising in Europe. By leveraging its success in North America and combining it with strategic partnerships and industry expertise, Unity is poised to lead the way in delivering innovative solutions, exceptional service, and measurable results to brands and agencies across Europe.For any inquiries or further information about our expansion into Europe, please contact Katya Kornilova.

Unity is delighted to announce that Unity Ads and ironSource Ads will soon start their alpha as real-time SDK bidders on the AdMob mediation platform and Google Ad Manager (GAM) platform, helping app publishers maximize their revenue opportunities.In-app bidding increases buyer access to the mobile app inventory, helping developers maximize their revenue opportunities within the bidding networks. AdMob and Google Ad Manager’s access to Unity Ads and ironSource Ads bidders creates an opportunity for their publishers and developers to get the highest bids possible for their inventory, while empowering the networks' advertisers with access to premium ad inventory and strong opportunities for scale and growth.App publishers using AdMob mediation and the Google Ad Manager platform will benefit from access to the Unity Ads and ironSource Ads bidders. In addition, AdMob and Google Ad Manager publishers will be able to seamlessly add Unity Ads and ironSource Ads networks to their monetization stacks without creating new waterfall instances, improving operational efficiency.“We have long collaborated with Unity, and are excited to take the next step in this journey by making demand from Unity and ironSource’s ad networks available to our AdMob and Google Ad Manager publishers,” said Ali Pasha, Director of Product Management for Apps Monetization at Google. “This SDK integration will especially benefit our gaming app publishers, bringing additional value and access to high-quality advertisers.”“We’re excited to be working with Google to help more publishers maximize their apps’ revenue through the strength of our bidding networks,” explains Nadav Ashkenazy, SVP and CRO, Unity Grow. “This partnership helps more developers and publishers take advantage of high quality demand from two of the industry’s strongest networks.”There will be further announcements from Unity once the bidders are available in beta.

The last 4 years are widely regarded as the age of hyper-casual. In just a few short years, the genre went from being relatively unheard of to taking 40% of the total share of voice for games - its snackability, accessible gameplay, and innovative creative strategy fueling its success.This success also impacted other game genres, which looked to the mass appeal of hyper-casual games as a source of users and an opportunity for growth. Since 2017, mobile game installs saw a 20% YoY increase, driven by hyper-casual games boosting game installs overall. The resulting growth peaked in 2020, reaching over 5B installs in the US.Since then, the growth of hyper-casual games has stayed consistent. But other mobile game genres haven’t been so lucky, with a moderate decline in downloads and eCPMs over the past two years thanks to macroeconomic shifts.A changing marketToday, hyper-casual games still reach 1.7B installs per year and bring in $2-2.5B in annual revenue. But a decline in installs is starting to show. As downloads for other genres declined, demand from these genres declined too, leading to a current decline in hyper-casual growth.It’s also no longer as easy as it once was to monetize hyper-casual games - eCPMs and LTVs have started to decline due to new regulations, app store policies, and macroeconomic conditions.While the hyper-casual genre is still very much alive and kicking, these conditions have led to an organic pivot for some studios and publishers with a new genre of games emerging: hybrid-casual.What are hybrid-casual gamesHybrid-casual games take the mass appeal and accessible mechanics of hyper-casual games and combine them with deeper gameplay loops and balanced economies of casual games. Hybrid-casual gameplay is still simple, but the quantity and quality of content are optimized for longer playtimes, aiming to keep players playing up to D60 and beyond. The result is a genre that remains accessible and marketable to the majority of players while having deeper content to motivate players towards rewarded ad units, IAP, and longer playtimes to create greater LTV.Consequently, there is less of an emphasis on interstitial and banner ads compared to hyper-casual games. In general, hybrid games get 45% more rewarded video impressions and generate 20-50% of their revenue from IAP - significantly more than hyper-casual.Also important is the longer development time required to create hybrid-casual games, usually 9-12 months. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. With games taking longer to develop, the market is less prone to saturation and is more stable - as of now, there are only roughly 15 successful hybrid-casual games that have reached scale.What this means for everyone1. A more stable supply for advertisersDue to the small number of hybrid-casual games on the market, and the long development time needed to create new ones, advertisers can expect more stability from the hybrid-casual supply. In the past, hyper-casual games launched at a massive rate, so it was hard to predict which game your ads were running on and who was seeing them. But with a narrower supply of hybrid-casual games, advertisers are more likely to know where their ads are running and who is seeing them - allowing them to more reliably predict ROAS.2. Better quality users for advertisersThis shift to hybrid-casual presents major opportunities for advertisers to acquire high-quality users. This is because hybrid-casual players are usually of higher quality and are willing to play and pay more than the average hyper-casual player. After all, they’re looking for a deeper game experience. The stability of the hybrid-casual market plus these higher quality players means that advertisers can acquire the right users.3. New monetization opportunities for developersHyper-casual games primarily monetize with interstitial and banner ads, which enable explosive growth, but can feel invasive to some players and, with the current market conditions, might offer lower performance to advertisers.In contrast, hybrid-casual games have a bigger focus on rewarded videos, and as a consequence playables. Rewarded videos are premium placements for playables since they motivate users to stay and watch an ad, rewarding them for doing it. Playable ad units demand a longer time commitment from the player (interstitial ads are usually limited to roughly 15 seconds, and playable ad units are often 45 seconds or more), but their conversion and engagement rates are far higher than interstitial ads.Thanks to the longer playtime and deeper meta of hybrid-casual games, players are more motivated to engage with these ad formats, giving developers access to effective monetization opportunities.A new mobile game market with hybrid-casualThe impact of the growing adoption of hybrid-casual will mean a bigger emphasis on playables and rewarded videos for developers. This will mean a better supply for advertisers who stand a stronger chance of converting users with these ad formats. Plus, the greater data predictability from the longer shelf-life of hybrid-casual games will lead to better optimization for developers and advertisers - offering great new avenues to success for both.

Each year the number of conferences filling up calendars only seems to increase - for every niche in the market, there’s an accompanying event. With so much to attend, it can be hard to figure out where you should be and when. So, to help you do just that, here’s a handy guide to the top conferences in 2023 for mobile app developers, publishers, and marketers. We can’t wait to see you there.Mobile app conferencesThis post will be updated with more mobile app conferences as they become available.GamesforumWhere: BarcelonaWhen: February 7 - 8, 2024What: Gamesforum Barcelona is designed to be a highly informative and intimate networking event for sponsor partners. The event focuses on F2P mobile games and ad monetization, with a concentration on providing actionable content for its delegates.Why you should be there: With topical keynotes and interactive panels, Gamesforum Barcelona is a key chance to network with the top players in the industry.Learn more here.MWC BarcelonaWhere: BarcelonaWhen: February 26 - 29, 2024What: Every year MWC Barcelona brings together app marketers, telcos operators, vendors, and device manufacturers for the largest event in the connectivity ecosystem. This year, attendees will hear from top executives from Microsoft, Dell, Accenture, and more.Why you should be there: There are few better opportunities to connect with senior executives from some of the largest connectivity companies in the world.Learn more here.Game Developers Conference (GDC)Where: San FranciscoWhen: March 18 - 22, 2024What: GDC is one of the gaming industry’s most prominent events, bringing the game development community together to discuss, determine, and inspire the future of the industry. It welcomes the best of the best – game designers, programmers, producers, business leaders, and more.Why you should be there: GDC is not just an opportunity to immerse yourself in great content and networking, but also includes a must-see expo showcasing the latest development tools and innovation from top tech companies. Also on offer are the Game Developers Choice Awards, a peer-based video game awards show celebrating the best games and their developers, and the Independent Games Festival, dedicated to honoring the best indie games of the year.Learn more here.Mobile Apps UnlockedWhere: Las VegasWhen: April 2 - 4, 2024What: The renowned MAU returns for yet another year, gathering experts from top mobile app brands for two days of learning, connecting, and building relationships. As an inclusive event, registration is simple and admission free for app marketers and businesses.Why you should be there: With leaders from top mobile companies in attendance, you’ll get to hear from and connect with the movers and shakers of the app economy.Learn more here.Mobile Apps UnlockedWhere: LondonWhen: July 2 - 4, 2024What: MAD//Fest is the kind of event that marketers look forward to all year. With speakers ranging from top ad execs to award-winning broadcasters and novelists, it’s the perfect mix of value and entertainment.Why you should be there: MAD//Fest has become a destination event in every marketer's calendar, sure to be jam-packed with quality content and connecting with top-tier talent.Learn more here.ChinaJoyWhere: ShanghaiWhen: July 26 - 29, 2024What: Chinajoy is the largest digital entertainment and gaming exposition held in Asia. It highlights the present and future of the tech and gaming industry, including product demos, tech showcases, developer sessions, tech talks, and much more.Why you should be there: ChinaJoy is a key opportunity to connect with leading industry experts in the global digital entertainment industry - not to mention, it’s completely free.Learn more here.

In a season marked by high installs per mille (IPMs), the holidays are an optimal time for user acquisition (UA). During this time, there’s a strong uptick in mobile user activity due to longer breaks from work and school, a spike in online shopping activity, and a rise in consumer spending, presenting a prime opportunity for in-app purchases (IAPs) and subscriptions.To optimize your UA strategy, doubling down on key channels, making data-driven decisions, creating content that drives conversions, and promoting high-performing creatives are key. Follow these tips to maximize your scale and improve your return on advertising spend (ROAS).Optimize your UA strategyAs you think about how to optimize your UA strategy during the holidays, consider these five techniques:1. Expand your reach: Acquiring the right users for your app during the holiday season means casting a wide net in markets with a higher number of high-quality users who are actively engaged. To make the most of the holiday season’s uplift in mobile engagement, increase your advertising reach to include all of the top geos, such as the US, UK, Germany, Canada, and France, to name just a few.2. Lower your goals and raise your bids: With access to greater volumes of high-value users during this time of year, you can lower your goals and increase your bids by ~15%. Doing so allows you to maximize scale and ROAS while bringing in users that are likely to retain well beyond the holidays.3. Use automated UA optimizers: Utilizing advanced machine learning can also help you acquire high-quality users at an optimal price. With the ROAS optimizer, you can maximize your in-app or ad revenue for D1 or D7.Additionally, the tCPA optimizer, which is currently in closed beta, will allow you to identify and acquire users more likely to complete specific in-app actions that are important to you. With so much going on during the holiday season both professionally and personally, automating your UA can free up time for where you’re needed most—like that holiday party that you still need to organize.4. Test offerwall campaigns: A good way to test the impact of offerwall during the holiday season is with campaigns that incorporate holiday messaging, include a sense of urgency, and offer users opportunities to make special purchases at the height of the shopping season. For more pointers on how to maximize growth over the holidays with offerwall currency sales, check out this blog.5. Run cross-promotion campaigns: Utilizing a cross promotional tool during the holidays can ensure that you not only retain the high-value users you’ve acquired, but also maximize the revenue they generate across your portfolio. Capture the influx of high-quality holiday users where they are most active by advertising your app in other apps within your portfolio. Doing so, you can keep these high-intent users within your reach.Refine your creativesIn addition to optimizing your UA strategy, make the most of the season by ensuring your creatives are holiday ready. Mastering your creative strategy can help grab the attention of users, positively impacting IPM and eCPM, and allowing you to buy high-quality users at a lower price. Here’s how.6. Refresh your creatives: As you refine your creatives, tap into holiday nostalgia to inspire compelling content and high-IPM creatives with some of these ideas:Use footage of real people who show pure emotionTest holiday images and seasonal concepts like snowflakes, gifts, and hot chocolateGive your pointer and buttons a holiday theme, like Santa7. Rotate your content: Amplify your best-performing holiday-themed creatives by switching up different variations of videos and end cards at least once a week. Fresh, timely, and diverse content can give you the competitive edge needed to attract new users.8. Update your custom store pages: Optimizing your app store landing page to match your holiday-themed creatives will lead to a consistent ad flow, which will likely improve your conversion rate and boost your IPM. Try this technique out with custom product pages in iOS and custom store listings in Android.Pocket Gems, a game developer with hits like War Dragons, offers a prime example of how updating your custom store pages can boost your UA. When launching their new game, Episodes, Pocket Gems connected versions of their app store landing page to specific creatives they were running on the ironSource network. As a result, they boosted their conversion rate by 8% and increased their IPM by 16%. Read more about their strategy here.Now imagine this same scenario but this time with a compelling winter holiday theme.9. Use long videos: The right length of videos that highlight more of your gameplay can attract high-quality users who are more likely to stay in your game. Recently, 60-second video ads have been performing well for this very reason. After all, only a grinch could resist a full minute of holiday-themed interactive content.The holiday season is a great time for advertisers to grow their app, leveraging the abundance of high-quality, engaged users who have embraced an online spending mindset.To ensure your app is ready to scale in the new year, it is essential to take action now by refining your UA strategy and capitalizing on holiday-driven IPMs. Running on ad networks, such as ironSource Ads or Unity Ads, can serve as valuable tools for maximizing your UA strategy over the holidays.Manage your campaigns

We’re excited to announce that the Unity 2023.2 Tech Stream is now available to download.Unity 2023.2 Tech Stream is the latest release of our 2023 development cycle. But after this version, we’ll be changing things up to make it easier to see what version is right for you.As announced in the Unite 2023 Keynote, we will be bringing back the clarity of our original release naming by changing the name of Unity 2023 LTS to Unity 6. This means that all 2023 releases, from 2023.1 (release in July) onwards until LTS, will be rolled up into the new Unity 6.With this change, you’ll start to see us migrating over to the Unity 6 naming convention for releases moving forward, but we’ve left this 2023.2 Tech Stream unchanged so you can find it easily. As always, our Tech Stream releases are fully production-supported until the next major release, so you can have confidence in using these great additions to the Unity Engine.For a sneak peek at what else will come in Unity 6, check out the Product Roadmap session from Unite 2023, where we talk about our focus on delivering elevated graphical performance, accelerated multiplayer workflows, dynamic AI capabilities, and support for web platforms on mobile and the latest XR platforms.Keep reading for highlights from this release, and check the full release notes for more details. We look forward to your feedback so we can continue working together to bring you the best possible Unity Editor experience.2023.2 features several improvements to cross-platform lighting performance, enhanced atmospheric capabilities for the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), and improved artist workflows in VFX Graph to elevate the quality and realism of your projects.Adaptive Probe Volumes (APV) has received significant upgrades to enhance iteration times and runtime performance, especially for the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) on mobile devices. The introduction of HDRP Light Probe Data Streaming from Disk allows smoother runtime experiences, optimizing CPU pools to accommodate all probe data in large scenes.Previously, APV supported only per-pixel quality indirect lighting, however this may be unsuitable for a range of mobile devices since it can lead to APV running below acceptable performance levels at runtime. With per-vertex quality settings for APV, you can determine quality levels for indirect lighting from light probes that enable them to efficiently run light probe-lit environments on mobile devices.The production release of the GPU Lightmapper is a game-changer, providing lightning-fast baking of lightmaps and probes that surpasses the capabilities of the CPU Lightmapper. The GPU Lightmapper can more than halve the time it takes to process your lighting data as compared to the CPU Lightmapper, and it is ideal for larger scenes and higher-resolution lightmap textures.Additionally, if you’re using Static Global Illumination (GI), the new Interactive Preview functionality enables simpler authoring and troubleshooting of baked lighting data, replacing “Auto Generate.”If you’re building modular content, including Light Probes, you’re no longer limited to read-only Light Probes positions. With this release, we provide you with an API that allows you to modify light probe positions after probes have been baked.HDRP delivers enhancements to extend visual experiences. HDRP Night Sky now supports time-of-day transitions, integrating stars and celestial bodies like the moon for more immersive scenes. Volumetric Clouds have also received significant visual quality improvements through better shadow maps, delivering more realistic and visually appealing self-shadowing effects.SpeedTree visual quality is enhanced in HDRP, leveraging the new Transmission Mask to apply subsurface scattering only on leaves. You can now remove unintended light transmitted from tree bark and twigs, as well as fix the overly bright billboard lighting that doesn’t match the 3D geometry’s lighting.Improvements to decals include compatibility with the Pathtracer Shader Graph-based decals can affect transparent objects, so you can build procedural effects like raindrops, ripples, custom engravings, dirt effects on glass, and more.In 2022 LTS, we introduced VFX Graph 6-way lighting for HDRP, and now it’s available for URP. These tools allow you to bake lightmaps and simulate the lighting in sprite sheets at runtime, so you can create customizable effects, like smoke, clouds, or steam, that work under different lighting conditions.VFX Graph Motion Vectors support, in conjunction with URP Object Motion Blur support, allows artists to blur objects moving faster than the camera’s exposure time. This enables you to deliver impressive visual effects that are seamlessly integrated with systems like Temporal Anti-Aliasing.The new VFX Graph Templates and Wizard gives you access to a template window that provides predefined effects, acting as a starting point for creating unique effects with ease.Additionally, for more seasoned VFX artists and developers, we have added a Custom HLSL Block. This extends the possibilities of VFX Graph, so you can add effects like flocks (through neighbor search) or reading back from a buffer to trigger audio.Shader Graph updates include Shader Graph for UGUI, allowing you to create an infinite array of animated effects and tune the behavior and appearance of the UI while also reducing performance and memory costs.The latest visual improvements across multiple platforms enhance the graphics-rich experiences gamers crave, while improving overall mobile gaming with added stability for Android devices.With the release of High Dynamic Range (HDR) cross-platform display support, you can reproduce images with a higher range of difference in luminance that’s closer to natural lighting conditions. HDR output allows for better preservation of the contrast and quality of the linear lighting renders and HDR images displayed on devices. The Unity Editor and Standalone Players now also provide full HDR tone mapping and display support across all rendering pipelines and capable platforms, including mobile and XR.Unlock stunning hardware-accelerated ray-tracing effects and simulations with inline ray tracing, which can be utilized in rasterization and compute shaders when targeting DXR1.1-capable Windows platforms, Xbox Series X|S, and Playstation®5. You can now issue ray queries from within shaders in order to traverse the bound ray tracing Acceleration Structure and perform intersection testing.In partnership with Google, the install and runtime experience on Android were improved to help you reduce the download size and provide valuable insights into issues that impact the overall stability of your game.Play Asset Delivery and Texture Compression Format Targeting are coming to Addressables, the recommended Unity asset management solution. With the new Addressable for Android package, you can use a new or existing Addressables setup to benefit from Play Asset Delivery’s dynamic delivery options. When you combine this with Texture Compression Target Formatting, players will get textures customized for their devices, at a smaller initial install size. Read more about the new package here.You can now integrate a host of new C# APIs that provide access to your Application’s exit reasons. These insights can help you to fine-tune user messaging in case of crashes and Application Not Responding (ANR) events, send to your analytics, or even adapt how your game launches. You can read more in the documentation.Unity has added support for Meta Quest 3 in 2022 LTS, 2023.1, and 2023.2. You can create VR games with familiar workflows utilized for previous Quest devices. Moreover, you can leverage AR Foundation to craft captivating mixed reality experiences for Quest 3 and take advantage of enhanced passthrough to seamlessly blend digital content with the physical world.Get started with new project templates for mixed reality, virtual reality, and mobile AR. These templates help you build and deploy for OpenXR, Meta Quest, Windows Mixed Reality, and ARKit– and ARCore–supported devices. Learn the basics with example scenes that use AR Foundation and XR Interaction Toolkit (XRI) to demonstrate world tracking and input and interaction features. Download templates from Unity Hub, and learn more in our documentation.XRI will include loads of updates to help create better interactive experiences. We’ve updated the ray-based interactions with several visual improvements to increase accuracy when grabbing objects. To help you build more interactive cross-platform games, we’ve added new Gaze and Hand functionality, such as: target objects with gaze, swap hands with controllers, spawn menu on wrist, and more. We’ve also updated climbing-based interactions to help you build more flexible climbing functionality.These are only some of the key updates, and you can learn more about what’s new in both XRI 2.4 and XRI 2.5 in our documentation.You’ll find additional improvements to Unity Transport with support for WebGL and simplified integration with Unity Gaming Services Relay. This update also introduces a new Network Simulation tool to Netcode for GameObject that simulates network conditions.The latest update to UI Toolkit for Unity enhances the ease and flexibility of connecting data to UI elements, streamlining the development process for UIs in both the Editor and Runtime environments. The new Runtime Bindings feature can now be configured using the UI Builder or directly through C# code using a comprehensive API. Additionally, the introduction of UXML Serialization and Attributes allows you to quickly create custom UI elements, reducing the need for repetitive coding by leveraging C# Attributes and integrating Custom Property Drawers within the UI Builder.The UI Builder itself has received significant enhancements with new features that reveal the sources of style properties, faster canvas manipulation, and support for UXML Objects authoring. This includes editing capabilities for complex UI components like multi-column TreeViews and ListViews. There are also new UI Toolkit controls such as ToggleButtonGroup and TabView, alongside improvements to existing widgets such as icon support for Buttons and customization options for ListView and TreeView elements.Unity’s Scene View has been upgraded with a new Context Menu, accessible through right-click or keyboard shortcuts, created using UI Toolkit and extensible via C#. This menu offers quick access to common commands and can be tailored for new tool development. Spline functionality has also been improved, with new data storage options on Spline objects and a refined point-editing interface in the Inspector. The Scene View Context Menu can be utilized here as well, providing added efficiency when working with Splines.In this release, we’re introducing the Audio Random Container, or ARC. Designed to enhance audio workflows, ARC offers randomized audio elements for various applications within Unity. This addition marks a significant step toward creating more dynamic and immersive audio experiences without needing to code. Now available at the asset level, ARC provides the ability to configure randomized effects such as general ambient noises, impact sounds, dialogue clips, and more, which can be triggered as needed, rather than being configured through scripts.A new Highlights module is available for the Unity Profiler. It helps you quickly identify CPU/GPU bottlenecks so that you can have a starting point to your performance optimization journey. In 2023.2, this module is not enabled by default, so you will have to open the Profiler window, then select the Profiler Modules dropdown menu to toggle the Highlights feature on to use it.To learn more about what’s in the 2023.2 Tech Stream, check out the release notes for a comprehensive list of features and the Unity Manual for details on how to use them. As you dive in, keep in mind that while each Tech Stream release is supported with weekly updates until the next version, there is no guarantee of long-term support for new features.Also, remember to always back up your work prior to upgrading to a new version. Our upgrade guide can assist with this. For projects in production, we recommend using Unity 2022 LTS for greater stability and support.The Tech Stream release is an opportunity to both get early access to new features and to shape the development of future tech through your feedback. We want to hear how we can best support you and your projects. Let us know how we’re doing on the forums, or share your feedback directly with our product team through the Unity Platform Roadmap.

Online shopping is common practice these days, but how well do we really know how consumers prioritize shopping apps on their phones?We surveyed 4,771 respondents based in the United States using our proprietary market research solution to look at consumer sentiment towards their shopping apps, the importance of shopping apps in their lives, and the key drivers for downloading new apps on their mobile devices.This summary offers insight to help you make informed decisions about advertising and monetizing your shopping app – especially with the holiday season right around the corner. Here are the most notable findings:Shopping apps are a popular destination1. 90% of respondents have multiple shopping apps on their phone, and 95% of respondents actively use at least one of their shopping apps once a month.Almost half of the respondents (48%) have 2-4 shopping apps on their phone, 29% have 5-9, and 13% have 10 or more, with almost all using at least one frequently, signalling a level of comfort and reliance using shopping apps. What’s more, is that 67% of respondents list 1-3 shopping apps among their top 10 most used mobile apps.Nonbinaries are super users with 22% having 10 or more apps on their phone, compared to 7% or males and 10% females. Additionally, 51% of nonbinaries consider 4 or more of their shopping apps among their top 10, compared to 30% of males and 26% of females.Takeaway: With the majority of consumers having multiple shopping apps on their mobile phones, and shopping app downloads nearly doubling between H1 2018 and H1 2023 to over 1.5B downloads*, there's room for yours too. User acquisition strategy needs to be top of mind, in order to find the right high value customers. Test and iterate your strategy to keep ahead of the curve. To keep users engaged, make sure you’re defining your unique selling point, and all the reasons a consumer should keep coming back.Early app exposure can help long term success2. Over 70%** of respondents are more likely to shop from an app if it’s already on their phone.22% of respondents are likely to download a new shopping app when they set up their phone for the first time, making it critical to get your app in front of users as early as possible. Looking at demographics, 37% of nonbinaries compared to 28% of males and 12% of females would download a new shopping app when setting up their phone for the first time. With a crowded app marketplace, being highly visible at early touchpoints can set your app up for success.Takeaway: Getting your app on a consumer’s device early is critical for long term success, since it removes barriers to entry and makes it accessible to the consumer from the get go. Engage users right out of the box as they’re setting up their new devices with Aura from Unity. Deals drive the download3. 49% of the respondents are likely to download a new shopping app if it offers special promotionsDiving deeper into demographics, 56% of women are more likely to download a new shopping app if it offers special promotions, otherwise known as currency sales, and 55% of Gen X feel the same.Takeaway: Having specialized offers exclusively available through the app is a huge incentive for first time users, such as offering a discount or monetary savings for first-time downloads especially considering who your target customer might be.Keep shoppers connected through communication4. 44% of respondents would like their favorite app to notify them about offers and promotions, with 26% answering that they were unsureAlmost half of respondents are comfortable with communications from shopping apps, with an opportunity to nurture those who might be on the fence. Providing relevant information for your customers can be a great retention strategy.Takeaway: Sending push notifications to keep customers engaged doesn’t pose a threat for churn. Remember to keep your communications as relevant as possible to your customer in order to provide a deeper level of personalization. Shopping apps are becoming more mainstream for consumers’ point of purchase, with verticals like clothing, health, and beauty primed to lead the charge. With this shift in behavior, you want to make sure there is strong app visibility, reasons to keep coming back, and easy navigation. Aura from Unity is an on-device advertising channel that recommends your app during critical moments of a device’s lifecycle, such as during device setup, as a native part of the device experience.*Source: Source: data.ai Intelligence . Note: Includes apps in the Shopping genre using data.ai's App IQ taxonomy. iOS and Google Play combined. China is iOS only.** 42% of respondents are more likely to shop from a shopping app if the app is already downloaded on their device with 31% saying they are unsure. This combined is 73%Methodology:Carried out a voluntary survey to 4771 respondents, all based in the US in June 2023Shopping app categories were defined as Clothes, Homeware, Electrical items, Health and beauty items, Sports and outdoor and Toys and gamesDue to the unique nature of grocery shopping, all of the respondents who marked down groceries as something they buy on their phone, also marked down at least one other shopping category aboveAll respondents shop through mobile apps on their phone (and possibly also mobile web, but not solely mobile web)Additional stats:What are people buying on their phonesClothes are the most popular item bought through mobile phones, with 57% of respondents marking it down. Health and beauty items follow next at 43%Shopping apps are a popular destination64% of respondents shop through both mobile apps and through the mobile web48% of respondents have 2-4 shopping apps on their phone, 29% have 5-9 and 13% have 10 or more95% of respondents actively use at least one of their shopping apps once a month. 74% use 2 or more at least once a month67% of respondents list 1-3 shopping apps among their top 10 most used mobile apps. 9% list 6 or more in their top 10The battle of the shopping apps35% of respondents have deleted a shopping app in the past year to free up space on their phone. 27% have done so as they only downloaded the app for a specific purchaseCheaper prices was the reason why 48% of the respondents would shop on one shopping app over the otherA more convenient app and the quality of the products came in at a close second and third at 39% and 40% respectively49% of the respondents would download a new shopping app if it offers special promotions, and 45% prefer an app as it’s more convenient than a website22% of respondents are most likely to download a new shopping app when they set up their phone for the first time42% of respondents are more likely to shop from a shopping app if the app is already downloaded on their device with 31% saying they are unsureShowing the love for shopping apps57% of respondents have at least one shopping app on their home screen, as opposed to on a different page or in a folder42-47% of respondents count good customer service, buying something they were really happy with and a smooth buying process, as reasons to provide a rating in the app store of a shopping app44% of respondents would like their favorite app to notify them about offers and promotions, with 26% answering that they were unsureDemographic breakdown80% of females compared with 57% of males and 27% non-binaries, shop for clothes through shopping appsNonbinaries are super users:22% of nonbinaries have 10 or more apps on their phone compared with 7% of males and 10% of females40% of nonbinaries actively use at least 5 or more of those apps at least once a month, compared to 21% of males and 18% of femalesAt 51%, nonbinaries consider 4 or more of their shopping apps among their top 10 apps on their phone, compared to 30% of males and 26% of femalesFemales are the most price sensitive:58% of females would choose one shopping app over the other if it offered cheaper or more reasonably priced productsAt 56%, females are more likely to download a new shopping app if it offers special promotions through the app37% of non-binary versus 28% of males and 12% of females would download a new shopping app when setting up their phone for the first timeFemales (33%) are considerably more likely than male (25%) and non-binary (11%) to download an app only for a specific purchaseMales are considerably more likely to delete an app because it was too complicated to navigate (22%) or because it was asking for too much personal info (21%)Age27% of Gen Z would download a new app if they heard about it from someone and 15% would download it after seeing a commercial55% of Gen X would download it if the app offers special promotions Surprisingly, 5% of Gen Z do not use any shopping app once a month, compared to only 2.7% of Gen XAt 7%, Millennials most likely to use 10 or more shopping apps at least once a monthAt 42%, Gen Z are the most likely to delete an app to free up space on their phone Gen X are the least likely to delete a shopping app, with 22% saying they haven’t deleted a shopping app in the past year 

User acquisition is at the core of app growth, and creatives are one of the best tools UA managers have to reach and engage new users. Knowing how to leverage them in your campaigns can play a big role in tipping the scales in favor of your app’s success.But creatives can also be a resource sink - necessitating time to experiment and the budgets to do so. By analyzing trends in creatives - from ideation to execution - you can hopefully skip the sink and get the most out of your creatives.Here are some of the top creative trends in games to help you drive engagement for your app:Classic game mechanicsMobile game developers make their creatives instantly recognizable and familiar to users by employing mechanics from classic games. Examples include games like pipe (connecting pipe pieces to get a flow of liquid from the entry to the exit), snake (a snake-like character is guided to eat pickups, growing as it does), and aim-and-shoot (hitting a target, while avoiding obstacles that move). While the mechanic in the creative might not be relevant to core gameplay, its familiarity can work to help boost conversions. You too can use classic game mechanics, think Cheetos’ ‘Cheetapult’ or ‘App of Massive Distraction.’ Familiar game mechanics are a great way to get users on your app, and they can also improve user engagement - playables ads have better CTR when compared to video ads.Before and after transformationsEveryone loves a good rags to riches story. Many games use before and after transformations to engage users, highlighting the progress a user’s character makes in their games. For example, they start by showing a low-level character struggling to defeat a mid-level enemy, then show that character leveling up to where they can dominate that same enemy. Visual clues like new, shiny armor and weapons also help show the character's journey.This can also be accomplished by transforming an object or person by direct action (for example, a person or object being washed, going from dirty to clean). This technique taps into the satisfaction of completing a journey or difficult task. Other examples include the compelling genre of DIY and ASMR videos, where you can’t help but watch a carpet being cleaned to completion.You can use these in your creatives to tap into user motivations. For example, use an image of someone hungrily waiting for their meal and then show them becoming full after eating using your QSR app (add in a meter filling for extra effect). Or, you could have a literal rags to riches story featured in a creative for a spend tracking app, showing a transformation from raggedy to well-dressed thanks to the ability to save money through your app.Laughter is the best medicineAnother great way to entice users is through humor. If a creative for a game makes a user laugh, then that user is already emotionally engaged. By entertaining users before they even download an app, publishers show them that their enjoyment has been put front and center.One way games do this is by using gameplay with a funny caption or an ironic twist. Another (and currently popular) technique is using real actors in short live-action skits centered around a game.For your app, the same principles apply. Use comedic skits featuring your app to give users a laugh and make your brand more personable and approachable. It’s a trick advertising agencies have been using for decades, whether for Volkswagen or Nintendo, and one that should be part of your marketing strategy.Follow the TikTok trendsShort-form video is at the top of the food chain when it comes to share of attention, and TikTok is a goldmine for content that’s proven to get and keep users’ attention. Use the same trends that are dominating TikTok as a way to get noticed by users. Just remember, when it comes to TikTok, relevance is everything - make sure you hop on a trend while it’s still timely or you could miss your window (and feel dated rather than relevant).Some of the ways TikTok trends can be leveraged include: using the app’s AI voiceover, adapting your game to fit a popular meme, or featuring your app in the corner of a trending video.Borrow some influenceAnother highly effective way to create convincing creatives is through influencer and user collaborations. Partner with users and popular influencers who fit your app’s target audience to get your creatives in front of the users you actually want.Influencer collaboration comes in various forms but the three most common tiers are micro-influencers (independent niche creators with a smaller following), content creators (social media entertainers or educators with a medium to large following), and celebrities (well known artists/public figures with huge followings). Examples include Calm and Bumble’s partnership with huge stars like Lebron James and Tiffany Haddish for mass appeal, while apps like Whatnot (a collectibles and trading platform) have partnered with smaller Youtubers and streamers for penetration into niche markets.Another option, if your budget is tight, is user generated content - one of the best ways to speak directly to your target demographic without breaking the bank. Offer select users a sample of your product or service with the condition that they post a testimonial on social media. Although you may lose reach by partnering with users with smaller followings, you gain cost-effectiveness and can still spread awareness.All of the reaping, none of the sowingMobile games have often been at the forefront of innovations in the mobile app industry. But sometimes there’s merit to being second. You get the opportunity to see what’s worked, and what hasn’t. Creatives are a perfect example of this. For every trend that’s proved successful, there are thousands of failed attempts (and misspent dollars and hours). Leverage the learnings from these creative trends and reap the UA rewards.

At Unity, we continually work to ensure our ironSource SDK is best-in-class. But with a huge amount of scale - more than 1 billion devices - ensuring a top SDK takes a village.Quality is a two part process - we need to (1) build a strong product for our developers, and that product needs to (2) ensure a good experience for users of our developers’ apps. And as we work to keep our developers and their users happy, the market continually pushes toward new and updated features. In this industry, there’s always a delicate balance between progression (e.g., testing for new software) and regression (e.g., confirming our software is still working well). Essentially, we can’t keep manually developing new features without supporting the features - and clients - we already have.Instead of needing to increase our resources, we can balance progression and regression with automation. Normally, you would have to manage a tradeoff between quality and quantity. But with automation, we don’t have to sacrifice one for the other - we can optimize toward progression and regression at the same time.So, how do we manage to scale while meeting and exceeding market demand and carrying the weight of hundreds of millions of daily active users? By ensuring every layer of our SDK delivery process is automated.Here’s how we use automation to ensure every one of our SDK integrations runs smoothly - from our developers and quality engineers, to our integration team. Layer 1: DevelopersLet’s start with developers because they’re the ones writing the code. From the moment our Unity LevelPlay developers start coding, we always have quality in mind - every part of our SDK is backed up with unit tests. Unit tests are basic, automated tests that ensure the SDK components are working well. Unit tests are constantly running, automatically checking if the API (application programming interface) is triggered with input, then output is as expected. Essentially, the tests confirm that the API is communicating properly. For example, if we want to integrate a new ad format into our new SDK version, the unit test would confirm that each ad format is presenting and working well.In fact, we’re not just ensuring that the API information is being communicated - we’re confirming that the information is consistently accurate. For example, within Unity LevelPlay mediation, there are different ad network requests popping up at all times. As the bidding system triggers an auction for the top ad network, it’s critical that every piece of data in this moving puzzle is up-to-date and accurate. If one piece is not accurate, it can affect the entire funnel, so our automated tests ensure we can keep a close eye on all of the moving pieces.This can be a very tedious task - highlighting why automation is so important. One of the biggest roles of automation infrastructure, particularly unit tests, is testing data all the time. Unit tests certainly cover regression, but not necessarily progression - so that’s where the next level of testing, integration testing, comes in.Layer 2: Quality EngineersThe next layer of progression is covered by the quality engineers, who specialize in a variety of testing - particularly integration tests. Integration tests automatically run on a daily basis, but instead of checking if our SDK component tests are working, integration tests check how these components work together. Continuing with our previous example, if we want to add a new ad format to our newest SDK version, quality engineers would set up an integration test, systematically checking how this ad format might interact with other ad formats. Even for automated tests, this can be a tedious process - with so many SDK components, there are an endless number of ways they could combine and interact. That’s why our SDK quality engineers tend to use the 80/20 rule, or testing the top 20% most common interactions to account for 80% of the combination scenarios. The larger the ground to cover, the higher the possibility of technical issues, so our quality engineers are encouraged to be hyper skeptical - and also assume there’s a technical issue, even if there’s not.Layer 3: Integration teamLet’s say the developers and quality engineers have already given this new SDK version the green light, including the new ad format. Even though this new version is ready for launch, it might not be able to thrive in every scenario - for example, it might not work well in a few countries that only have 3G.Before we release this new SDK update to developers, our integration team uses alpha apps, internal production apps made with in-house tech, to measure how the update will perform in a real scenario - both from the developer’s and user’s perspective. In our example, the integration team would test the SDK on real traffic in these countries, using the same tools that developers use, just in a closed environment. Both integrating the SDK into an alpha app and uploading the app into the store are fully automated processes. In many ways, the integration team works like a production line, with many automated steps along the way.Once the new SDK version is live, we can continually make adjustments to ensure the best quality user experience. As we develop many of our new SDK features, we include a toggle option - so if one feature ever becomes faulty for a certain audience, we can turn it off if needed.Combined, these three layers of testing ensure that we have a fortified automation infrastructure - ensuring that our products are high quality for every one of our many users. The automation process grants us the biggest gift possible - time - which we can use to focus on progression, and developing new and innovative features to keep our SDK best-in-class.

When a developer is ready to show an ad but the video isn’t ready, their users’ experience could suffer - and due to missed opportunities to show an ad, so can revenue.By using latency data to pinpoint optimization opportunities, you can increase impressions and improve your user experience, ultimately boosting revenue. Let’s explore how to get started with latency optimization.Does my app have a latency issue?First, you need to confirm if you have a latency issue - you might not even have one at all. Let’s review the key latency terms:Waterfall latency is the time (in seconds) it takes to get an ad ready, from the moment an ad is requested until it’s ready to showInstance latency is the time (in seconds) it takes for an instance to respond to an ad request Latency tolerance is the average duration of time a developer is willing to accept between ad impressionsYou only have a latency issue if your waterfall latency is higher than your latency tolerance - in other words, if it takes longer to get an ad ready than the time you have set between ads.If you don’t know your latency tolerance, you can calculate it using internal BI metrics - or you can estimate it by playing your game and measuring exactly how often you’re seeing ads. Pay attention to the ads carefully - if they’re not appearing at the moments they’re scheduled for, it’s an issue worth investigating and minimizing.How do I fix my latency issue?Reducing latency is a multi-step process and differs depending on the ad unit - let’s start with banners and interstitials.The first step is identifying instances that are taking too long to load - and LevelPlay’s real time pivot can help you do just that. Here’s how to find and delete them.Identify waterfalls with potentialStart by identifying waterfalls that need optimizing, and focus where optimizing could make the most impact on revenue. Look for apps, ad units, and geo groups with relatively high waterfall latency and high revenue. Then you can generate your own waterfall from the past 7 days using the app, ad units, and geo groups you found as your waterfall filters. To optimize for latency, your waterfall measures should include “revenue,” “revenue SOW (share of wallet),” “instance latency,” and “eCPM” as measures. Make sure to sort it by eCPM. Identifying problematic instancesNow identify your target: instances that are slowing down your waterfall and not generating enough revenue to justify the slowdown.First, count how many instances you have in your waterfall (on Unity LevelPlay, you can find this by going to the mediation management page, where you can download a CSV of your waterfall).This gives you key information: whether you have a short or long waterfall. A short waterfall just has a few instances causing latency issues - but assuming you have a long waterfall (e.g. 50+ instances), you’ll need to pinpoint many problematic instances.Next, use your revenue filter to find instances that have the least impact on revenue - we suggest anything generating less than 0.3% of your revenue to start.Then, count how many instances are filtered and the sum of their overall share of wallet. It’s important to find a balance between instances contributing to your revenue share of wallet (market share of revenue) and instances causing latency. Generally, it’s best to remove the most instances possible without reducing your revenue share of wallet more than about 6%. It’s too risky to remove more than 6% of your share of wallet, but removing anything less than 3% may not have enough of an impact on your latency. So, if you’ve counted your instances and the sum of their overall share of wallet is more than 6% or less than 3%, you should adjust your revenue filter as needed. If the share of wallet is too high, then lower the filter to 0.2% - and if it’s too low, try raising it to 0.4%.During this process, make sure you’re focusing on a few things:Only non-bidding instancesInstances towards the top, not the bottom of the waterfall - the instances at the bottom aren’t causing delay like the instances at the top areReducing latency in a short waterfallEven if you’re looking at a short waterfall, you might still find yourself having latency issues. In this case, the latency isn’t caused by having too many instances in your waterfall - rather, it’s a case of specific instances with high latency, so focus on instance latency.Try looking for any high-latency instances at the top of your waterfall. If you can identify a problematic instance, decide how to address it - if it has low revenue share of wallet, then A/B test removing it. If it has significant share of in your waterfall (e.g. more than 5%), then you can still A/B test removing it - but pay attention to how that impacts performance .A/B testing removing instancesNow that you’ve selected the instances you’d like to try removing, you should run an A/B test. Just make your A group the original waterfall, and your B group the new waterfall with instances removed. Make sure the only difference between the groups is the removed instances - otherwise you can’t pinpoint exactly what’s caused your boost (or drop) in revenue. As you analyze your test results, keep an eye on your KPIs - your B group should have decreased waterfall latency, which should lead to increased impressions per DAU, ARPDAU, and ARPU.What about rewarded video ads?With rewarded video ads, optimizing with latency is a slightly different process thanks to progressive loading. It works by setting up the ad loading process in advance - while the user is watching the first ad, the second one is already loading, and so on. Like other ads, rewarded videos can still have latency - but thanks to progressive loading, you should only see latency during the first video of a session (session depth 1).To examine rewarded video latency in your waterfall, just break up your waterfall by “session depth” and keep an eye on waterfall latency. Then, you should confirm two things - first, placements with back-to-back rewarded videos have less than one second of latency (from the second video onward). Second, make sure your first video doesn’t have high latency. Any instances that don’t pass these two tests are worth investigating and even A/B testing their removal. *If you decide to remove instances, it’s important to see how this might impact later sessions - so make sure to first remove the “session depth” filter from your view*The further you dig into your waterfall’s latency, the further you can optimize it - and it’s never too late to get started. Latency optimization is a win-win: while your users can get a better experience, you can boost impressions and revenue.

The back-to-school shopping season is around the corner and consumers are writing up their shopping lists of pencils, textbooks, and first-day outfits. This season, 72% of consumers say they’re planning on going back-to-school shopping - making it a key opportunity for your business. To get a clearer picture of school shopping behaviors, spending habits, and consumer preferences, we surveyed 7,315 US shoppers. Here’s what we learned: 1. 54% of consumers use a mobile app for their back-to-school shoppingThe majority of US consumers are likely purchasing their back-to-school supplies from their devices - 54% of those surveyed say they’ll be doing their shopping from their mobile apps.Many consumers already rely on their phones for their shopping needs, from researching deals to finding a store’s location. It makes sense, then, that they’d rather download an app than drive to their nearest store.Takeaway: An easy way to win customers is to make sure they’re aware you have an app they can directly shop from, making their shopping more efficient during this busy period. Feature your app in your advertising campaigns to remind users that your brand has an app touchpoint they can use to browse or even make purchases.2. 60% of consumers plan to do their back-to-school shopping between July and August The back-to-school shopping season is around the corner and consumers are writing up their shopping lists of pencils, textbooks, and first-day outfits. This season, 72% of consumers say they’re planning on going back-to-school shopping - making it a key opportunity for your business. To get a clearer picture of school shopping behaviors, spending habits, and consumer preferences, we surveyed 7,315 US shoppers. Here’s what we learned:1. 54% of consumers use a mobile app for their back-to-school shoppingThe majority of US consumers are likely purchasing their back-to-school supplies from their devices - 54% of those surveyed say they’ll be doing their shopping from their mobile apps.Many consumers already rely on their phones for their shopping needs, from researching deals to finding a store’s location. It makes sense, then, that they’d rather download an app than drive to their nearest store.Takeaway: An easy way to win customers is to make sure they’re aware you have an app they can directly shop from, making their shopping more efficient during this busy period. Feature your app in your advertising campaigns to remind users that your brand has an app touchpoint they can use to browse or even make purchases.2. 60% of consumers plan to do their back-to-school shopping between July and August29% of consumers surveyed expect to do their back-to-school shopping in July and 31% in August. Since over 60% of consumers plan to get their shopping done in these two critical months, you only have a narrow window to maximize the impact of your back-to-school campaigns.The numbers peak in August and then drop to their lowest in September (3.6%) - so don’t miss the deadline or you could land in the seasonal dip. Though it’s a limited timeframe, it’s a great opportunity to drive significant ROI and create impactful engagements.Takeaway: It’s critical to be intentional about when and how you start to run your campaigns. Start running your back-to-school test campaigns as soon as possible to ensure you have time to analyze and optimize before the July/August window closes.3. 76% of respondents shop at 2-5 retailers for their back-to-school suppliesA majority of consumers surveyed had one thing in common - they would be shopping at multiple retailers for their back-to-school supplies. 50% of those surveyed said they would shop at 2-3 retailers and a further 26% said they would be visiting 4-5 retailers. Only 13% of respondents said they would be shopping at a single retailer.Takeaway: Smaller retailers should feature high-demand products in their campaigns so users know they can find exactly what they need with your brand. For larger retailers, focus messaging and creatives on your wide product range so users know they can get more of their back-to-school shopping done with you - saving them time.4. 78% of consumers plan to spend more than or the same as last yearWhile other retail sectors have seen a drop in spending this year, most consumers plan on spending the same as they did last year on their back-to-school shopping. In fact, 29% of surveyed shoppers plan to spend more.While budgets are tightening in other places, back-to-school shopping is a necessity for most - making it one of the few areas where customers are willing to increase their spending and a prime opportunity for advertisers to drive more business.Takeaway: Turn your browsers into buyers by using the seasonal shopping boost to promote your inventory as a whole. With consumers increasing their spending on back-to-school supplies, it’s a great time to push related school and children products - like sporting goods and toys. 5. 52% of respondents said they are likely to be influenced by rewarded adsOver half of all respondents (52%) said they are likely to be influenced by rewarded ads (in-app ad units that offer users a reward in exchange for opting in to interact with an ad) during the back-to-school shopping season - making them a great way to incentivize users to engage with your brand and choose your products.While rewarded ads are typically associated with games, it’s not only stereotypical ‘gamers’ seeing them: the majority of hypercasual gamers are women - the same group most likely to go back-to-school shopping (59%). Also of note, shoppers report the best predictor of where they’ll be doing their back-to-school shopping is a coupon or deal on their goods - 57% of respondents say they’re more likely to use a brand or retailer if they’re offered a promotion to shop there.Takeaway: Don’t underestimate the value of rewarded ads in your advertising campaigns. Use them to offer users deals on their purchases, giving them a good reason to choose your brand or app for their back-to-school supplies. With students getting ready to return to school, now is the perfect time to tailor your ad experiences for audiences shopping for the classroom. Use these findings to help you optimize your back-to-school strategy and meet customers how and where they’ll be shopping.

According to Databox, around 80% of marketers prefer looking at short term goals, like eCPI, because it's easy to measure, all the competitors are doing it, and it saves money. However, as a subscription app, planning for the long term is critical, especially for campaigns on ad networks.Let’s say you pay $0.60 for an install, a relatively low cost in the US. If the user who installed your app churns on day 1 - 25% of users will likely do so according to Business of Apps - that $0.60 is a sunk cost.Elina Dakhis, Senior Strategic Partnership Manager at ironSource, with a focus on Apps Beyond Games, shares her insights on why LTV is important for your subscription-based app and tips to master it.Why you shouldn’t spend all of your resources optimizing towards short term goalsBefore diving into how to measure success in the long term, let’s first dive into why you shouldn’t devote all of your attention to short term goals and achieving low CPIs.Higher bids bring in revenue generating usersIt’s possible to have great install rates but flat revenue - there isn’t always a clear correlation. Often, the problem lies in optimizing towards driving cheap installs, or low quality installs that drive very little value. Meanwhile, more expensive installs lead to users that will spend time in your app, engaging with your premium content, generating more revenue, and eventually converting to subscribers.Diversity of bids means diversity of usersLocation, device platform, and network all have an impact on the price of the cost per install. For example, CPI differs by country depending on how big the audience is, how much they spend inside apps, etc. To reach a diverse set of users across different geos, devices, and networks, it’s important to remain open to a range of costs. Just because a bid is low, doesn’t mean those users aren't valuable, and vice versa.So, you shouldn’t be narrowing in on achieving low CPIs - high CPIs are actually quite valuable. That said, to determine what’s best for your strategy, it’s crucial to look at long term goals. We suggest calculating your LTV.Longer term goals help you determine user acquisition costsBlindly paying for low CPIs without looking at long term metrics, such as LTV, means you could be missing out on an opportunity to spend more to acquire high-quality users and increase profit. If you know how your users behave in your app in the long term, you can predict how much revenue you'll generate from your users, and you can make more calculated decisions for your UA budget.How to build the LTV model for campaigns on networksTo get a clearer picture into the effectiveness of your campaigns, it’s important to look at user behavior after they install the app and into the long term. Note that you should build dedicated LTV models for the different channels you’re running with - social, ad network, etc. Here’s how to measure LTV for your ad network campaigns taking into account multiple revenue streams:1. Plot the ARPU curve taking into account all revenue generatorsARPU, or the average revenue per user, is determined by calculating the accumulated revenue generated by a segment of users on a specific day after install. To determine ARPU, first, sum all of the revenue generators - the amount subscribers pay, the revenue from in-app purchases, and the revenue from ads. Then, divide that by the number of installs. For example, if a segment of 1,000 users generates $6,000 over 6 months, the Month 6 ARPU would be $6. If those 1,000 users generate $12,000 over 12 months, the Month 12 ARPU is $12.When building the ARPU curve for subscription apps, it’s important to take into account all of your revenue generators - subscriptions, in-app purchases and ads. For some apps, you can stop at choosing a relevant ARPU goal, 12 months for example, to determine the value of your users. For most, however, you’ll need to construct an LTV model from the right trendline.2. Choose the right trendline for each revenue generator to build your LTV modelPlace a trendline over the average revenue per user (ARPU) curve to build the LTV model. Doing so automatically fills in the revenue predictions from the last day of calculated data to the end of the users’ lifetime in your app.When building the LTV curve for a hybrid model with subscriptions, ads, and/or in-app purchases, keep the behavior of these components in mind. A logarithmic trendline usually works better for the LTV curve for apps that don’t monetize with subscriptions. We’ve found that a power curve fits over the ARPU the most accurately for subscription apps. This is because subscription apps tend to offer some kind of utility that stands the test of time. Once you’ve built the ARPU curve for each revenue stream, stack them on top of each other to get a more accurate prediction. Below is a more detailed example.The graph above is the LTV model for the first 180 days of a Social Utility App - their monetization model is based on subscriptions and ads. As you can see, we plotted the ARPU curves (solid lines) based on data we already had for subscriptions and ads separately. From there, we placed power curves (dotted line) to predict the future revenue - keep in mind that the end of the LTV curve does not indicate a user’s last day in the app. Based on the graph, we can assume that the LTV for the average user will be $0.80 for weekly subscribers, $0.25 for monthly subscribers, and $0.15 for ads.Now’s the time to start measuring the granular metrics to optimize the precision of your LTV model. There’s more to creating a winning LTV model than just choosing the right trendline.3. Enrich the model with more dataThere’s a lot of uncertainty behind building an accurate revenue prediction, and it’s important to be comfortable with this. Typically, apps have many more non-subscribers than subscribers and subscription rates are constantly changing. IAPs offer a glimpse into the level of user engagement, but often don’t paint the whole picture of how users behave in your app.It’s important to look at other engagement events outside of just how much a user is paying each week, month, or year or their engagement with IAPs and ads when building the LTV model. In fact, you should be tracking as many metrics as possible, as early as possible. You can include any type of in-app engagement, such as opening the app a certain number of times, editing a few photos, etc. This granular understanding of your app’s overall performance will help you determine exactly where you stand, allowing you to streamline your strategy towards investing in the right users.If you start including other metrics into your LTV model and you see different behaviors for different user groups, you should consider building different models to reflect different revenue streams - subscription, IAP, ads - rather than combining them into one.4. Build a different model for each subscription time frameMany apps offer weekly, monthly, and annual subscriptions, and these users are going to behave differently and bring in revenue at different rates - it’s not one size fits all.Rather than converting annual subscriptions to the monthly equivalent, it’s best to build an LTV model for weekly vs. monthly vs. yearly subscriptions. From there, if you’re including an engagement metric outside of revenue, you can apply a different rate to each model (since, for example, churn will be different for monthly users compared to weekly users). This way you’ll improve the accuracy of your LTV model and have a better idea of how specific users are interacting with your app according to different subscription models.What now?Once your LTV model is ready, the next step is adjusting your KPIs based on the information to ensure you’re making the best decisions for your UA strategy. Choose a reasonable margin you’d like to maintain and determine the shortest KPI possible where you can still accurately predict long-term user behavior in your app. Often, it’s the average time it takes a user to subscribe. Your work doesn’t end here - continue to adjust the data so the LTV model remains as updated as possible and takes into account fluctuations in user behavior, such as during holiday seasons, unexpected pandemics, political unrest, etc.Measuring short term goals are important, but long term goals are just as, if not more, important to calculating overall success and the effectiveness of your campaigns. Start measuring your LTV model using the above steps and be sure to take into account multiple revenue streams.

Now that players’ budgets are tightening, it’s becoming more important for midcore and hardcore games to diversify their monetization strategy beyond in-app purchases. According to data.ai, consumer mobile gaming is on a downward trend - it dropped 5% in 2022, and will drop another 3% in 2023 to $107 billion.How do developers fill that gap in monetization? They can do it in a way that won’t require players to spend a penny: carefully placed ads.In fact, based on Unity LevelPlay data, ad revenue for in-app purchase based genres (RPG, casino, puzzle, simulation, lucky rewards) has been steadily on the rise since 2020. As consumer spending continues to decelerate, we’ll likely see a major uptick in 2023.As you explore an ad-based monetization model for your mid-core or hardcore game, it’s worth determining which ad units get you the most bang for your buck. Based on our data, the answer is clear: rewarded videos and offerwalls. Here are four best practices to get started.1. Make your offerwall stand outIt’s likely easiest to start with the ad unit most similar to the in-app purchase model: the offerwall. Like in-app purchases, this mini-store offers valuable hard currency to users. But unlike in-app purchases, no cash is required - just the user’s time.The more accessible you make the offerwall to users, the bigger your revenue potential - so make sure your traffic drivers get users’ attention by putting them in the right spots. Here are the most effective traffic driver locations that maximize your offerwall engagement:Home screen: The best traffic drivers are the most visible ones - so your game’s home screen is an ideal spot to promote your offerwall, and increase impressions as a result. Store: The store is filled with users already looking to increase their hard currency, making it a great place to tell users they can get this currency for free.Breaks in gameplay: Placing traffic drivers during natural breaks in the gameplay (out of currency, end of level) can improve the user experience by giving players currency when they need it most. Start small with new placementsThe other critical ad unit to include in your ad monetization strategy is rewarded video - they’re completely optional, and offer players an enticing reward for a short amount of their time. They work well with every type of game - including traditionally in-app placement-based games, because their soft currency doesn’t interfere with paid hard currency. And the best part is - because offerwalls and rewarded videos work with different currencies - you can implement them both at the same time.During implementation, we’ve seen one common mistake: adding too many ads right away. If you build a complex placement system and add it to a game, it will be extremely hard to analyze its performance. This is especially true in in-app purchase-based games - since the deeper a game economy is, the harder it will be to attribute certain successes to certain placements. That’s why we recommend starting with one or two placements.As you set your ad placement strategy, make sure your ads are checking all the boxes:Optimizing exposure (e.g. placed in busy areas like the main screen)Helping players reach their goals (e.g. offering extra soft currency to upgrade a weapon). Once you see your placement is performing well, you can double-down on your strategy and start adding more rewarded videos.Balance your game economyAs you’re adding new soft currency placements to your game, like rewarded videos, there’s a chance they can impact your in-game economy - so you need to adjust it accordingly.Let’s say you’ve added a new rewarded video placement - even though they’re optional for users, you should always assume that every player is watching them, so you can balance your economy accordingly.The chart below, for example, shows how you can always incorporate ads into your economy without impacting the total amount a player receives per level. With each amount of currency your ad is offering, you can simply reduce that amount from your end-level winnings - keeping everything balanced. For example, in Level 4, users can win 20 coins through in-app purchases. If you incorporate ads, you’ll need to split that 20 into 10 for in-app purchases and 10 for ads.It’s important to remember that your new placements should only offer soft currency, not hard currency. This way, you can avoid cannibalizing your in-app purchases and the hard currency they offer.A/B test your placements as you goOnce you’ve added a new placement (rewarded video and/or offerwall) and adjusted your economy accordingly, it’s time to test how your new ad system is working and make adjustments as needed.Let’s say you added a new offerwall traffic driver and rewarded video placement to the home screen. Now you optimize. How’s your engagement rate? For the rewarded video placement, is the amount of currency affecting people’s interest in making in-app purchases?By understanding how players are engaging with your ads, you can adjust accordingly - and eventually apply your insights to any new placements you add.Once you’ve found a baseline placement (rewarded video and/or offerwall) that meets your KPI goals and you’re ready to A/B test, start with the basics:The ad’s location in the game (e.g. home screen vs. store) The placement’s design and messagingAnd, for rewarded video placements, go even deeper by testing:Currency type and amountCapping and pacing the ad’s frequencyTo accurately measure A/B test results, make sure to only perform one test at a time on any given placement. Your best measuring tools are retention and ad revenue per user (ARPU). If you’re making changes that boost ARPU while retaining high retention, you’re on the right path.Ultimately, as the industry adapts and changes, developers - particularly those who make traditionally IAP-based games - can adapt accordingly. Offerwalls and rewarded videos are key for increasing monetization, and with the right implementation strategy and A/B tests to optimize performance, there’s only room to improve.

The video streaming industry is booming - but do we really understand how consumers feel about streaming apps and their logic behind engaging with these services?To offer you deeper insight into how to position your streaming app in such a competitive market, we ran a survey using our proprietary market research solution to discover how people use streaming apps on their mobile phones and why they download new ones. Here are some key findings:Streaming apps are a critical vertical for users1. 68% of respondents rank a streaming app among the Top 10 apps on their phones and over 60% consider two or more streaming apps among their Top 10.Streaming apps are an important vertical when it comes to users' app priorities, not just an afterthought.Takeaway: You’re competing for space. It’s important that you speak to users with a high level of confidence, communicating why your app should be in users' Top 10 above competitors’ apps and other app categories.2. 66% have a streaming app on their home screen for quick access.According to Comscore, 61% of smartphone users move an app to the home screen because of frequent usage, 54% because of easier access when ready to use, and 18% because of its looks.Takeaway: Aesthetics are key. Even before you highlight your app’s value, make sure your app icon stands out and grabs user attention among the many apps on the home screen.3. 59% of respondents admitted that if they woke up to find no apps on their phone, they'd download their favorite streaming app among the first five apps they restored...reaffirming the claim that streaming apps are an app category users can’t live without. Interestingly, Gen X are the least likely generation to keep a streaming app on their phone’s home screen, yet if they woke up to find no apps on their phone, they are the most likely to download their favorite streaming app as the first app they restored.Takeaway: Work with a channel that puts your app front and center when users are looking for new apps. After all, you want to be the app of choice from the very beginning in order to increase your likelihood of being an app users can’t live without.Streaming fatigue? It’s just a myth.4. Despite headlines that users are decreasing their number of streaming apps, only 7% said they would not download another streaming app.This means that 93% of people would be ready and willing to download your app if they haven’t already.Takeaway: While it's important to be the first app of your kind on users’ devices, there's also room to get downloaded later on if your app matches a user's need. Ensure you differentiate your offering and continue to reach users throughout the device lifecycle through your advertising.5. Of the 93% who would consider a new streaming app, 52% said it would be for a specific show/movie they want to watch.60% of women would download a new streaming service for a specific show/content, as opposed to only 48% of men.Takeaway: Your content is key.Price is make or break for many users6. Over 40% of users who cancel their subscriptions do so because of cost.Demographics play a major role here. Women are more price sensitive: 45% have canceled a streaming service because of a price increase, as opposed to 36% of men.Takeaway: It’s important to communicate why your app is more valuable than competitors. It may be best to address your cost head-on and explain why your app is worth its price.7. 49% of users say they would download a new streaming app if it was free or discounted.50% of women said they would download another streaming app if it was discounted or free, as opposed to 43% of men.Takeaway: Free ad-supported (FAST) apps are a growing niche in the streaming industry, and offer room for growth especially to the female audience.Growth in offering an ad-supported subscription option8. Nearly half of all streamers pay to remove ads from at least one streaming app.This trend is consistent across all age groups, with Gen X leading the charge at over 60%, likely because they have higher spending power and can afford the cost.Takeaway: There’s a huge growth opportunity in incorporating different monetization models into your streaming app’s strategy, such as a free ad-supported plan alongside a more expensive ad-free plan. When communicating the ad free plan in your advertising, it’s best to appeal to those paying the bills in the house.9. 37% of users don’t have free ad-supported television (FAST) apps on their phones.Of those that do, 54% have between 1-4 apps. This means there are tons of users out there who haven’t started using FAST apps just yet, and they may use more than one app when they do. Takeaway: There’s a big opportunity for FAST apps to further grow their audience, which makes it that much more important to reach the right audience. Based on contextual triggers, on-device advertising is in a unique position to place your app directly in front of users that are likely to download and engage with your app into the future.Streaming apps continue to see growth and engagement, which means you want to set yourself up to reach users in the most effective way possible. Aura from Unity is an on-device advertising channel that recommends your app during critical moments of a device’s lifecycle, such as during device setup, as a native part of the device experience.

Brand safety is always a high priority, but has been a particularly hot topic the past few weeks. Times like this present an opportunity to consider additional channels to add to your media plan that make brand safety a priority.To find out which channels are the safest for brands, we leveraged MobileVoice®, ironSource's market research platform, to go straight to the source: the consumers. 3,130 consumers shared their opinions on the safety of advertising platforms and how it affects their purchasing decisions. According to the survey, mobile apps, games, and news sites are among the safest channels, with the lowest amount of inappropriate content. Let's explore why.67% of consumers believe the brand has a responsibility to not advertise on platforms with inappropriate content and 74% of consumers believe the platform has a responsibility to make sure they don’t house inappropriate content. For platforms, this means building safe environments for consumers and advertisers, according to these results. For brands, this means being intentional about the platforms you choose.To combat unauthorized reselling and app spoofing, apps and games add the app-ads.txt file to their websites, which lists all the ad sources authorized to sell their inventory. Meanwhile, ad platforms that apps and games use like the ironSource Exchange have the sellers.json file, which lists out all our authorized sellers and resellers, to increase transparency and combat fraud. These ad platforms also often have the IAB Open Measurement SDK integrated to ensure that all the ads passing through are brand safe. Specifically, it gives advertisers transparency into inventory quality, ad viewability, and fraud detection. The ironSource Exchange for example has had the Open Measurement SDK integrated for 3+ years, for example. The consequences for deferring responsibility can be harmful, as 66% of consumers would feel negative about a brand that advertised on sites that contain inappropriate content and only 21% of consumers would continue using those brands according to the survey. Gen Xers, who have the largest spending power with 31% of all income dollars than any other generation according to reports from American Express, are the most likely (70%) to feel negative or very negative about a brand that advertised on sites that contain inappropriate content and the least likely (19%) to continue using the brand.2. Apps and games are closed channels that don’t allow for user generated contentHate speech is the most common (61%) and the most offensive (60%) form of inappropriate digital content, according to consumers according to the survey. The next is fake news (49%), followed by explicit material, profanity, and violence.Generally, these are found on channels centered around user generated content, where people can do and say as they want, whenever they want. On the other hand, mobile apps and games, news sites, and search engines don’t have space for user generated content and open dialogue, meaning ads can’t be seen next to inappropriate material people are writing and sharing. This is likely the reason why many consumers believe these sources have the smallest problem with inappropriate content compared to other channels, according to the research.3. Ad content on apps and games is heavily monitoredMore than any other generation, 72% of parents say that inappropriate digital content is a significant or very significant problem according to the survey. Because parents make the final call on where their family spends time online and have the responsibility to prevent their family from using platforms that don’t adhere to their standards, it’s especially important that the channels you use have extremely advanced and thorough review processes for inappropriate content. Otherwise, you risk missing out on a large audience not using the platforms you're running on, according to the survey results.The ad platforms that apps and games use have built-in features and dedicated teams to monitor and flag inappropriate content before it reaches the app. For the ironSource Exchange, that includes automatic testing as well as manual review for each and every ad that passes through. In fact, each ad is tagged according to the type of content it displays and ranked according to its maturity level. This way, the Exchange only serves the ad on apps suited for it, and inappropriate content can never make it to the app environment.To take the ad review process a step further, there are tools that app developers can use to get visibility into all the ad content their users see, ensuring their app stays clean.There’s a lot of commotion in the brand advertising space right now. To ensure your brand ads are deployed on safe and clean environments, start running on apps and games through the ironSource Exchange.

There’s a common misconception that influencer marketing works best for brand awareness campaigns - but according to Ryan Silberman, CEO at Webfluential, it’s increasingly being used to drive performance. At Appfest 2022, Ryan explained how you can leverage influencer marketing to increase installs. Read the summary or watch the video below.The original ad recipeAccording to Ryan, creating engaging ads has historically been built on using two basic ingredients: context and personalization.Advertisers first use what they learn in different environments (context clues) to offer relevant information to consumers (personalized content). For example, let’s say a woman comes into a store soaked from the rain. When the store keeper offers her an umbrella, he’s using context clues (the woman soaked from the rain) to give her an item.Leveraging trust: Nano influencersHowever, even when you implement context and personalization into your ads, there’s a key ingredient still missing in the mix: trust. By incorporating trust into your ads, you can generate higher consumer confidence in your product - that’s because when we trust someone, we’re more likely to believe what they say.Consumers are more likely to trust people who feel accessible and relatable. For example, someone touring a new city likely trusts a local’s recommendation over a celebrity that’s getting paid to give those recommendations. Even though a celebrity is more well known and has a higher reach, a local would seem more credible. Another word for a person with a smaller reach, but a higher engagement rate? Introducing nano influencers.Nano influencers are influencers that have fewer than 3,000 followers. The graph below illustrates how leveraging nano influencers shows huge promise: the smaller someone’s audience size, the higher their engagement rate is.Improving performance at scaleEngagement rate is one thing, but can it translate to actual transactions like sales and installs?Looking to garner more sales, Elysium Health, an American health company that sells vitamins, partnered with nano influencers who were passionate about cycling, to drive traffic that resulted in sales. They used that content at scale by running ads on Facebook and Tiktok and managed to improve the CPA by 2x.Beyond sales, nano influencers can also improve sentiment towards your app. That’s because you’re creating an authentic narrative with your audience, while also showing your product in a positive light. In fact, Chef, a restaurant tycoon game, teamed up with nano influencers to create sponsored content that showed a 10x uplift in sentiment.Referrals with resultsIn addition to traditional social channels like Instagram and TikTok, here’s another way nano influencers can share your ads - dark social.Dark social includes more intimate channels like WhatsApp or email, in which nano influencers can simply copy and paste a link and share it directly with friends - producing extremely high conversion and engagement rates. In fact, Ryan says 84% of sharing is in dark social. So while it’s not tracked or spoken about, it’s a huge opportunity to leverage with nano influencers.Tips for influencers becoming a performance channelRyan gives us the 4 key pillars that make a successful influencer program.1. Technology platformHaving the right platform saves time and money for recruiting and contracting the right influencers. An added benefit is that it also manages your workflow.2. InventorySome people may think you need a lot of influencers on stand-by but according to Ryan, that’s actually not the case. What’s important is that your influencers are opt-in, meaning that they’ve linked their social channels, have agreed on contractual terms, and are fully ready to work - getting you a faster campaign turnaround.3. Strategy (on demand)You’ve got your technology and the right influencers, and now it’s time to decide what the influencers should do. Ryan’s suggestion? Bring your influencers into your world and ask them what the strategy should be, because they know their audience best.4. Execution + paidEven if you hit the other 3 pillars perfectly, Ryan says this is the most important pillar to ensure success. If you can’t execute at scale then it means nothing and organic isn't big enough. You need to integrate into ad networks and social platforms to scale up.Wrapping upIf there’s one thing to remember with influencer marketing, Ryan encourages you to remember these key points.Apply trust, context, and personalization to engage users Use low cost nano influencers as opposed to high cost celebrities or branded contentFigure out how to leverage dark social and use your ad networks through Paid Retention is built into the community - use this to your advantageWatch the recording here: https://youtu.be/-lN_RX4gj8c

At Appfest 2022, ironSource’s Maytal Shaul, Anna Popereko, and Yuval Lotan walked through 3 ways you can impact growth in the heavily automated App Economy - including tips for custom product pages, ad placement strategy, and A/B tests. Read the summary or watch the video below.In the mobile app industry, automation has been a growing force - improving performance for both user acquisition and monetization. But as Maytal, VP Business Growth at ironSource explains, automation is not a threat to manual control. In fact, to get to the best performance, man and machine should work together.Here are 3 areas where app and game companies can utilize this control and have the most impact.Spend more time optimizing on ad strategy and placementsYuval Lotan, ironSource’s Head of Platform Growth, kicked off the session with some important findings - optimizing placement strategy has significantly higher growth potential than optimizing waterfalls, up to 400% in fact. But surveying LevelPlay customers showed a disconnect in time allocation, with most studios investing the majority of their time into areas with the least growth potential.So why do studios tend to invest less in placement strategy? There are three main reasons: risk, team structure, and data accessibility.The retention riskNaturally, changing your ad placement strategy can be riskier than changing your waterfall - since it can affect retention, playtime and in-app purchases while optimizing your waterfall won’t. But for those same reasons, it can also be much more beneficial. According to ironSource research, users who engage with rewarded video have much higher retention rates and are much more likely to make in-app purchases. That increase in performance makes it a risk worth taking.Team structureTo best optimize your ad strategy, you need an expert, or a team of experts, who understand what your users need and how they respond to different ad units. But that can be difficult when your studio’s structure isn’t built for it.It can be tricky, for example, to collaborate on placement strategy when the monetization manager, product manager, and game designer, all sit under different teams with different goals. One might prioritize in-app purchase revenue while the other prioritizes ad revenue.That leaves you with three options:- Make changes to your company structure, if needed- Hire a dedicated person for this role, like we did at ironSource (more tips by her later)- Outsource to an agency, like ironSource’s game design consultancy Data transparencyMany studios also hesitate to invest in their placement strategy because it’s difficult to get transparency into what success looks like. Here are some of Yuval’s tips:First you need to know what KPIs to look out for. Start with engagement rate, or the percentage of users watching your ads - which is the best way to evaluate your growth potential because it’s proportional to your revenue. Additionally, pay attention to impressions per engaged user and impressions per DAU.Next, find out your category’s benchmark from your mediation partner - if you have a clear target, it’s much easier to define goals. For example, one RPG game compared their KPIs to the benchmarks and saw their rewarded video engagement rate was low but impressions/engaged user was high. From this, they understood that their ads were delivering good value to their users, but the traffic driver wasn't accessible enough for them to find it. In fact, when Yuval’s team built recommendations for this game, they calculated the game had a growth potential of more than 40%, because they estimated they could reach the genre’s median engagement rate. Eventually, this game boosted engagement rate by 60% - all while keeping retention stable.Following Yuval’s call to spend more time optimizing placements, Anna Poperko, ironSource’s in-house Game Design Consultant, shared four tips on how to do just that.Data is kingTo fully understand how users are engaging with a traffic driver, Anna recommends comparing KPIs (engagement rate, impressions/DEU, etc.) rather than viewing them in isolation - this way, you get greater context for players’ behavior. Let’s say one placement has a very low engagement rate but very high impressions per/engaged user - you can conclude that players don’t notice this placement often, but those who do find it very valuable.Understanding your players’ motivationsTo monetize players, it’s essential to first understand them and what they need. Gamers are commonly split into standard motivational groups - mastery, achievement, creativity, and more. If, for example, you know your players are motivated by achievement, you can match their motivations to a placement strategy that suits their needs - like offering a rewarded video to help when they fail.Know your competitorsTo maximize your ad placement strategy, it’s always worthwhile to learn from similar games to know exactly what makes your competition succeed. Playing those games is an opportunity to compare and understand their user flow. Do they have more or fewer placements? Where are their placements located? Does their app address the same user motivations as yours? See what gaps you can fill in your placement strategy - every insight is an opportunity, and there’s always room for improvement.Get inspired by other genresBeyond competitors, Anna recommended getting inspired by other successful genres that lean on similar player motivations. For example, Anna worked with a first-person shooter game that never updated the items in their store - losing engagement from players. Inspired by racing games that have stores which refresh monthly, the shooter game decided to refresh their store items more often - and revenue quickly increased. Even though the genres were vastly different, they both had “achieving” player motivations in common.Utilizing custom product pagesIn addition to optimizing placements, Maytal covered another area for growth: Apple’s custom product pages, a product of iOS 15 which has huge potential to boost IPM and conversion rate. 15%-43% increase in IPM, 8%-37% increase in CVR, and 7%-40% increase in eCPM, to be exact. It works by connecting custom versions of an app’s App Store landing page to specific creatives.Looking at the ironSource network, more than 40% of the spend is running with Apple’s custom product pages - and 90% of the advertisers utilizing custom product pages are running their UA through ironSource ROAS optimizer. From that, we understand that automating their bid strategy gives them more time to focus on their creatives and product page experience.As Maytal explained, there’s a reason why and how custom product pages boost IPM and conversion rate. Basically, they add an extra layer of optimization to the user journey - either towards your audience or your creatives. By optimizing custom product pages toward your audience, you get an additional opportunity to focus on language and localization, unique holidays, etc. Meanwhile, by optimizing towards creative elements, by adding screenshots, previews, similar colors, character, and other elements to match popular creatives, you get to build a better bridge between the product page and the creative that sent them there..In fact, when Pocket Gems saw one creative outperforming the rest, they created a custom product page to include that creative’s theme and ran it on the ironSource network. After a successful A/B test, they implemented the new page into their main campaign, and their IPM boosted by 16% as a result. Learn how they did it with ironSource.Applying A/B testingA/B testing is another key strategy to optimize both user acquisition and monetization.In fact, there’s a direct correlation between studios automating monetization by adopting in-app bidding and running A/B tests.By A/B testing monetization, you can measure the impact of any in-game change without hurting KPIs. It also helps predict ARPU and retention uplifts, while giving a clear window into users’ behavior.If you suspect that a change, even a small one - can boost your revenue or scale, it’s always worth finding out. In fact, among LevelPlay customers who A/B test - in 62% of cases, the B group wins - those who applied the new change saw their LTV grow by 7%. These changes might include adding/updating bidding networks, testing different ad placements (capping, pacing, rewards), and banner refreshment rate - all of which have the biggest impact on LTV.To run A/B tests successfully, Maytal recommends:- Challenging existing strategies you have - user behavior in a game is always changing - Testing a wide cohort of users to see the A/B tests impact on all audiences - Looking at both overall and granular results to better understand that the change will impact all groups positively- Testing everything - everything has potential to be optimizedSimultaneously, Maytal suggests:- Avoiding running tests that are too long in order to not risk hurting KPIs- In order to always pinpoint what is affecting results, don’t run test different test versions simultaneouslyUltimately, while the automation tools we have have great potential to increase performance, there is always room for manual optimization - we just have to find the best places to do it.

Programmatic video advertising is a complex, multi-layered topic. Multiple networks serving different audiences — advertisers on the demand side and publishers on the supply side — work together with third-party mediators to serve video ads to billions of end users in the blink of an eye.It’s also a multi-billion dollar industry under constant, rapid evolution, and understanding it is key to reaching your audience and maximizing ROAS. Wherever you are on the demand or supply-side of the mobile ad stack, you should be aware of how the programmatic ad service process works and where things are headed.Let’s dive into programmatic video advertising and go over what it is, identify several key trends for the future, and break down how to choose a programmatic video platform that’s right for you.In this post, we’ll cover the following:What is programmatic video advertising?A timeline of growth for programmatic video advertisingProgrammatic video trends to watchHow to choose a programmatic video advertising platformMake programmatic video easyWhat is programmatic video advertising?For years, direct media buying — where advertisers made direct deals with publishers to determine exactly where their ads would run — ruled the landscape. And while direct media buying still works for static media, the advent of interactivity through the internet and smartphones allows for users to be directly catered to based on their individual interests. That’s where programmatic video advertising comes in.But what’s a good programmatic video definition? Essentially, as ads are served to users in mobile games, through connected TV experiences like Roku, or social media platforms, they are bid on in real-time by ad networks. The value of the bids is determined by characteristics like user demographics, what game they’re playing or app they’re using, and the bid ceiling set by the advertiser. The winner of the bid has their video served to the user.What makes programmatic video advertising so mind-blowing is that all of these bids are happening automatically in the fractions of a second between the moment an ad is called (like when a user taps on a button to double their reward in a game) and when it’s served. Market forces determine the cost of an ad, and data like user acquisition and ROAS can be monitored in real-time. And while the whole market cycle can seem intimidating and highly-technical, platforms like the ironSource Exchange make it easier than ever to integrate and display ads.To learn more about the benefits of programmatic video advertising and the channels best suited for it, read our guide, What Is Programmatic Video Advertising?A timeline of growth for programmatic video advertisingThe programmatic video ad market has seen an explosion of growth over the last few years, and it shows no signs of slowing down.In 2019, surveys showed that programmatic video ad spending grew to more than $24B. Only two years later, that number shot up to $52B according to a 2021 report by eMarketer, with the potential for ad spend reaching $62.96B in 2022. Mobile ad spend accounts for two-thirds of all programmatic video spending, with connected TV following behind and steadily growing.And that’s just in the United States. Global programmatic video ad spending reached $112.9B in 2019, eventually hitting $155B in 2021 and accounting for 34% of all global programmatic ad spend.As smart device and mobile game adoption grows, so too will programmatic video grow to meet the demand.Read more about programmatic video growth and learn about the top programmatic advertising video players in Your Guide to the 2022 Programmatic Video Advertising Market.Programmatic video trends to watchMobile advertising technology moves fast, and it’s important to have a sense of where things are headed so you can stay a step ahead of the competition.In terms of ad content, the rise of TikTok as a social media platform has caused a shift in the kinds of ads companies are creating for the programmatic video marketplace. Ads themselves are starting to look like TikToks, often being repurposed from TikTok itself to suit the more specific needs of mobile games and other apps. Videos are shorter, filled with dances or direct conversations, and often embrace subtitles or other text alternatives like written signs to present information.Privacy moves made by Google and Apple have made waves throughout the industry, as the removal of third-party cookies and updated app tracking policies are forcing mobile ad companies to get creative with data solutions. Advertisers are looking to first-party data to replace information third-party cookies would normally provide, and are implementing solutions like rewarded ads and the offerwall to paint a better picture of user data. It’s also leading to a wider move toward consolidation, as agencies look across the demand- and supply-side stack for opportunities to shore up weaknesses and strengthen their offerings.How to choose a programmatic video advertising platformProgrammatic video advertising platforms integrate with the demand side and supply side of the mobile advertising stack, and determining which platform is best for you will depend on which side of the stack you’re on.Advertisers looking for the best way to increase their return on ad spend (ROAS) will want to find a platform that offers the following:A large audience of engaged usersFull-screen video offerings that won’t go unnoticedEasy testing for a variety of creative and placement optionsSDK integration that provides access to thousands of connected appsIf you’re an app publisher looking to maximize user engagement and revenue, you’ll want to find a platform that can:Connect your app with a large network of advertisersProvide rewarded videos and offerwallsEasily integrate via industry-standard SDKsProvide support for programmatic mediation so you can ensure impartiality on ad bidsCheck out our guide on How to Choose a Programmatic Video Advertising Platform: 8 Consideration for more details on how to pick a platform that suits your needs.Make programmatic video easyThere are a lot of moving parts within the programmatic video advertisement world, and it can seem like a lot to take in. You don’t have to sweat the hard stuff, though. The ironSource Programmatic Marketplace makes putting your ads in front of billions of engaged users in brand-safe environments with complete transparency easier than ever. Contact us today to learn more.

Whether you’re an advertiser or a publisher, partnering up with the right programmatic video advertising platform is one of the most important business decisions you can make. More than half of U.S. marketing budgets are now devoted to programmatically purchased media, and there’s no indication that trend will reverse any time soon.Everybody wants to find the solution that’s best for their bottom line. However, the specific considerations that should go into choosing the right video programmatic advertising solution differ depending on whether you have supply to sell or are looking for an audience for your advertisements. This article will break down key factors for both mobile advertisers and mobile publishers to keep in mind as they search for a programmatic video advertising platform.Before we get into the specifics on either end, let’s recap the basic concepts.What is a programmatic video advertising platform?A programmatic video advertising platform combines tools, processes, and marketplaces to place video ads from advertising partners in ad placements furnished by publishing partners. The “programmatic” part of the term means that it’s all done procedurally via automated tools, integrating with demand side platforms and supply side platforms to allow advertising placements to be bid upon, selected, and displayed in fractions of a second.If a mobile game has ever offered you extra rewards for watching a video and you found yourself watching an ad for a related game a split second later, you’ve likely been on the user side of an advertising programmatic transaction. Now let’s take a look at what considerations make for the ideal programmatic video advertising platform for the other two main parties involved.4 points to help advertisers choose the best programmatic platformLooking for the best way to leverage your video demand side platform? These are four key points for advertisers to consider when trying to find the right programmatic video advertising platform.A large, engaged audienceOne of the most important things a programmatic video advertising platform can do for advertisers is put their creative content in front of as many people as possible. However, it’s not enough to just pass your content in front of the most eyeballs. It’s equally important for the platform to give you access to engaged audiences who are more likely to convert so you can make the most of your advertising dollar.Full-screen videos to grab attentionYou need every advantage you can get when you’re grappling for the attention of a busy mobile user. Your video demand side platform should prioritize full-screen takeovers when and where they make sense, making sure your content isn’t just playing unnoticed on the far side of the screen.A range of ad options that are easy to testYour video programmatic advertising partner should be able to offer a broad variety of creative and placement options, including interstitial and rewarded ads. It should also enable you to test, iterate, and optimize ads as soon as they’re put into rotation, ensuring your ad spend is meeting your targets and allowing for fast and flexible changes if needed.Simple access to supplyEven the most powerful programmatic video advertising platform is no good if it’s impractical to get running. Look for partners that allows instant access to supply through tried-and-true platforms like Google Display & Video 360, Magnite, and others. On top of that, you should seek out a private exchange to ensure access to premium inventory.4 points for publishers in search of the best programmatic platformYou work hard to make the best apps for your users, and you deserve to partner up with a programmatic video advertising platform that works hard too. Serving video ads that both keep users engaged and your profits rising can be a tricky needle to thread, but the right platform should make your part of the process simple and effective.A large selection of advertisersEncountering the same ads over and over again can get old fast — and diminish engagement. On top of that, a small selection of advertisers means fewer chances for your users to connect with an ad and convert — which means less revenue, too. The ideal programmatic video advertising platform will partner with thousands of advertisers to fill your placements with fresh, engaging content.Rewarded videos and offerwallsInterstitial video ads aren’t likely to disappear any time soon, but players strongly prefer other means of advertisement. In fact, 76% of US mobile gamers say they prefer rewarded videos over interstitial ads. Giving players the choice of when to watch ads, with the inducement of in-game rewards, can be very powerful — and an offerwall is another powerful way to put the ball in your player’s court.Easy supply-side SDK integrationThe time your developers spend integrating a new video programmatic advertising solution into your apps is time they could have spent making those apps more engaging for users. While any backend adjustment will naturally take some time to implement, your new programmatic partner should offer a powerful, industry-standard SDK to make the process fast and non-disruptive.Support for programmatic mediationMediators such as LevelPlay by ironSource automatically prioritize ad demand from multiple third-party networks, optimizing your cash flow and reducing work on your end. Your programmatic video advertising platform should seamlessly integrate with mediators to make the most of each ad placement, every time.Pick a powerful programmatic partnerThankfully, advertisers and publishers alike can choose one solution that checks all the above boxes and more. For advertisers, the ironSource Programmatic Marketplace will connect you with targeted audiences in thousands of apps that gel with your brand. For publishers, ironSource’s marketplace means a massive selection of ads that your users and your bottom line will love.

Since 2008 when it first emerged, the app economy has evolved to include some of the biggest brands in the world - and one thing these successful app-based businesses all have in common is a strong marketing strategy. Just look at the marketing spend from some top brands across industries:Bumble spent over $60 million in Q4 2021 aloneLyft’s marketing and selling expenses exceeded $411 million for all of 2021Dog-walking service app Wag! spent over $10 million on marketing in 2021, a drastic increase from $3 million in 2020As marketing channels continue to be dynamic and evolve with consumer behavior trends and industry shifts, app businesses must adapt to stay up to date and ahead of the competition. New platforms, features, and placements, like TikTok and Instagram Reels, are emerging constantly - it’s up to the CMO to design an internal structure for finding opportunities for scaling on existing and new channels, all while managing your budgets as efficiently as possible.Unified app marketing is the best way to tick off these boxes. Like the name suggests, a unified app marketing strategy aggregates all UA campaigns across channels into a single platform. Here, I’m discussing three benefits of this strategy for app CMOs, including what I’ve seen work to drive growth for app businesses and manage ad spend as effectively as possible.1. Improve team collaboration, engagement, and communicationApp marketing teams can consist of many roles, including:- UA managers- Ad operations- Analysts- Creative designers (internal or external)However, in many app-based businesses, each team is often siloed - they’re doing their roles then handing it off to the next person in the chain. The creative designers, for example, build the creative then send along to the UA managers for deployment. They then look to the ad operations team for adjustments before it’s handed off to the analysts for reviewing performance. The creative team never learns about how their ads performed or have any insight beyond their initial responsibility.But no matter the size of your marketing squad, unifying them gives everyone transparent access to data and closes the loop between creatives and optimization. Often, an aspect of your role as CMO is building an ideal team structure - enhancing collaboration and communication is part of this, as is giving all teams access to a single dashboard. For more tips on improving your creative team, check out this piece my colleague Dan Greenberg wrote about growing ironSource’s creative studio and hiring, creating an efficient structure, and optimizing our work culture.Unifying your marketing team gives everyone transparent access to data and closes the loop between creatives and optimization.A unified marketing approach can also promote greater engagement internally because team members feel more involved and invested in the success of campaigns. Going back to our earlier example, when you let the creative team get insights into how their ads performed from the analysts, they’ll likely strive to improve and start building an internal database of best practices as they make changes and track the results. When your team and processes improve over time, you become more efficient, too. You spend less time managing each team as their own silo and more time scaling the business and focusing on higher-level operations.2. Shorten the learning curve and improve efficiencyFor many app CMOs, a key goal is achieving and sustaining growth across new and existing channels. But a major challenge to this is the operational overhead and knowledge it takes to run successful cross-channel campaigns. Each channel behaves differently, and your team is responsible for replicating success on each one, while adapting the strategy to suit its unique behavior. The more UA campaigns that your organization is running, the more the team needs to track, adjust, and optimize - that takes a lot of manpower.The learning curve can also be steep when you’re expanding into new channels that your team has never run on before. Your marketing team should use the same platform to monitor campaigns so they’re all viewing performance within the same context. If your growth manager is only looking at campaigns on one channel without any point of comparison, they’re missing out on opportunities to apply learnings from other platforms and make optimizations. Giving them a view of campaign performance across channels lets them analyze performance more quickly and easily. And improving your team’s efficiency makes your role as CMO easier, too - you’ll be able to extract the insights you need about channel growth in a clearer and faster way.3. Spot trends and themes more quickly and easilyWhen running large-scale marketing campaigns, there’s a lot of information your team is looking at to draw correlations and spot opportunities. There’s data from sources like your MMP, the channels themselves, and your own BI systems. Currently, many marketing teams use separate platforms for aggregating each metric, like LTV predictive platforms that require users to pull data from each channel to get a result. It all gets even more complicated the more channels you’re on. For your team, they need to crunch the numbers on each platform and analyze increasingly more data. And for you as CMO, it’s then more difficult to spot the high-level trends and make the correlations that are essential to your role.By unifying your campaigns - and their data - into one platform, it’s a lot easier for both you and your entire team to extract insights and connect the dots that expose trends. Part of your role is ‘decoding’ the creatives - essentially adding meta data that enriches your analysis and helps you trace the origins of the ad. So including labels for information like which team created the asset and the marketing theme, then consolidating this onto a single platform can help you better organize campaigns and get a clearer birds-eye view of what’s working.Consolidating the meta data of your creatives onto a single platform can help you better organize campaigns and get a clearer birds-eye view of what’s working.Managing, optimizing, and extracting insights all becomes more efficient when cross-channel campaigns are aggregated into one place, and this usually leads to better performance.Managing the future of app marketingUnifying your app marketing is key to staying agile and dynamic as the mobile advertising industry continues to shift. That's why when building ironSource Luna, we considered the needs of all teams involved in app marketing - from creative production to managing cross-channel campaigns. With a single platform that allows your team to create, monitor, manage, and optimize campaigns across channels, you can make more accurate and impactful decisions that drive your app’s growth forward and reduce wasted spend.Analyzing further, we understood that different team members look at the same data through different angles. This is how we came up with Luna Views, which lets CMOs and their teams customize their own dashboards, so they can visualize their most important metrics with greater ease and clarity. While most dashboards are built for the UA managers and operations teams, this is customizable for everyone, including the creative teams. Improving accessibility and efficiency for your team while making it easier for you to extract high-level insights leads to better performance you can sustain and scale over time. Going forward, bringing all of your app marketing channels onto a single platform should be the new normal - it benefits your team, your own role, and your organization as a whole.

Today, a third of users say they find new apps through in-app ads according to Tech Jury. With advertisers fighting to get discovered through this channel, now's the time to start optimizing your UA campaigns to gain an edge when users are searching for new apps. This means reevaluating your strategies to ensure you’re getting the most for each dollar.The problem? There are many choices to make for each campaign, such as which app categories and games you want to run on, the ad units you’ll utilize, and so on. Frank Dawson, Director Business Growth at ironSource, shares tips based on performance and success stories so that you can make data-driven decisions when optimizing your UA campaigns.1. Don’t limit spend to your app categoryIt’s common for app advertisers to only run campaigns within their own category - for example, a finance app may only run campaigns in finance apps. However, today, you can find high-quality users in nearly every app category, which means you can find success and drive incremental growth by spending in categories outside of your own.1. App functionality has advanced significantly and, today, app-based or app-first businesses have become leaders in fitness, communications, finance, and more. 2. Users with varying levels of tech awareness are comfortable relying on apps and playing mobile games. 3. For a large portion of the market, users have grown up with smartphones, meaning apps are the first place they look for solutions. .Finance apps, for example, have increased their advertising spend in apps as they’ve expanded into new verticals (crypto, P2P, etc.), spending mostly in social apps - likely because finance apps now support social interaction, allowing you to engage with others financially to split costs. Entertainment apps are looking to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible, which makes hyper-casual games with a broad range of user demographics a valuable supply source.With high quality users across the app ecosystem today, it’s valuable to test your ads in a range of app categories to see where you could be driving incremental growth. Once you’ve decided where to run your ads, the next step is deciding what type of ads to run.2. Gamify your playable adsThere’s a strong case to be made for gamified creatives - no matter the app category. In fact, we’ve found that gamified apps, and creatives, show higher IPMs on gaming supply - it makes sense that users would be more inclined to download apps that have similar features to the game they’re playing, especially when the creatives are gamified as well. For example, a well known fitness app offers badges and rewards when you hit your goals or meet your daily targets, triggering a sense of achievement, similar to that of puzzle, match 3, word or solitaire games. The creative for this app triggers these same emotions. Gamifying the creatives for apps that are not already gamified may not be so intuitive, but these ads can also perform incredibly well in games. Ads that are interactive and personal are more engaging - rather than staring at a screen as your ad plays, you’re enticing users to play a direct role in the creative process. Let’s look at some examples.Calm, a leading wellness app, partnered with ironSource to grow their user base using the ironSource network and creative solution. ironSource helped them develop a playable ad that gamified relaxation by letting users mix paint on-screen, a cathartic and interactive break from digital overload. The gamified, playable ad generated massive scale and 106% increase in installs for Calm.In addition, a well-known fast food restaurant created a playable, gamified ad where their most popular food items cycle across the screen and the user has to “catch” or stop the screen when they see the french fries. This ad invokes a sense of achievement and reward similar to that of games. The gamified ad generated a 50% higher IPM.Gamifying your creatives is a surefire way to increase your installs. If you aren’t already reevaluating your ad strategy to instill interactivity and achievement, now's the time to start. Beyond gamification, there are more ways to maximize the success of your ads, such as running questionnaire videos.3. Run questionnaire video creativesQuestionnaire video creatives can make users more comfortable entering your app and, in turn, answering questions.For apps beyond gaming that may require personal information from users, such as banking apps, to generate a personalized experience, highlighting how seamless the process is and how little input is actually needed is important for getting users comfortable with your app. To make users comfortable as early as possible, run questionnaire video ads, which function as mini tutorials guiding users through the beginning stages of the app journey. These creatives also help users understand the app functionalities that align with their specific interests. Many apps beyond gaming have a diverse offering of services and questionnaire creatives can educate users about which are relevant for them.For example, a leading weight-loss app developed an interactive creative that asks users about the necessary criteria to build out their fitness plan, mimicking the onboarding experience of the app itself. Users are asked about their gender, body type, and age before being directed to their personalized fasting plan. This short questionnaire video shows users how easy it is to get their own personalized weight-loss plan and encourages them to get started.Similarly, a well-known finance app created an interactive ad that takes users through the process of customizing their own debit card. Without asking any personal or private questions right off the bat, the finance app eases the stress users may have sharing their information with a digital bank.Diving deeper, coupling your questionnaire video with a carousel endcard is a great way to maximize the performance since interactive end cards enhance user engagement and drive more meaningful connections. They have the ability to set expectations for what different types of user experiences will look like once they enter your app.While each app category appeals to a different type of user, and the ads you choose to run should reflect your audience’s typical behavior, it’s still important to diversify your app growth strategy.4. Turn on CPE campaignsFirst, advertisers started diversifying their in-app advertising strategies by running interstitials and rewarded video alongside banner ads, broadening their ad strategy into full screen creatives. Seeing success from these ad units, advertisers have started running offerwall to expand their reach even further, and it’s proven to be a valuable addition.Offerwall uses the CPE (cost per engagement) pricing model, which means you choose a post-install event and only pay for users who engage in that specific event (for example, when the user posts an update or uses a certain photo filter). This makes CPE incredibly cost-effective while offering immense scale.With CPE campaigns, you’re able to optimize towards events that better predict long term user value and stickiness versus an install, ensuring you’re only paying for high LTV users.On top of that, these events can occur at down funnel points in the app that can take a while for users to get to, encouraging users to engage with down funnel events to get their reward.Finance, entertainment, and shopping apps have generated the most success for CPE campaigns because these app categories often have high-value events deep in the funnel that often result in long term app usage. For example, subscribing, depositing money, transferring money, linking a bank account.Getting started with offerwall: why it's important and how to succeedIn-app advertising, especially for apps beyond gaming, is a hot topic in user acquisition today, which means it’s crucial for you to focus on optimizing and perfecting your strategy to gain a competitive advantage. These four tips, backed by examples and data, are a good starting point.

Having a diversified mix of user acquisition channels is key to ensuring incremental growth and dominating within the competitive landscape. While it's important to attract the low hanging fruit from traditional channels, it’s equally as important to reach new, high quality users from new channels that would be otherwise inaccessible.However, choosing a new channel can be daunting - there are tons of channels to choose from (social media, SDK networks, search, on-device) and even more sources (Facebook, Google, ironSource).So, how do you select the right channels for your app and what criteria should you focus on? Start here.Set your user acquisition budget: You want to find the right balance between investing in user acquisition and investing in other areas of your business, such as product. Before allocating your budget across channels, first, set an overall user acquisition budget based on a cost-benefit analysis (whether the amount of users you’ll acquire is worth the cost).Measure your risk: Next, decide how much money and time you’re willing to risk in adding new channels and how aggressive you’re willing to be. This way, you can make stronger decisions about adding new, uncertain channels to your mix. With a distinct understanding of your user acquisition strategy - how much you’re willing to spend and the risk you’re willing to take - it’s time to start researching new channels.Here are 7 questions Dor Isseroff, Senior Director of Sales and Partnerships at Aura, gets asked about whether or not to buy users on a new user acquisition channel. Scroll down to find out the answers for Aura, ironSource’s on-device advertising channel.1. Does the channel fit my target audience?Be aware of the demographics and psychographics of the users on the channel to ensure they fit your target audience, or, at least, see whether they could represent a new opportunity for your app.For apps that attract many different types of users, such as males and females ranging in age from 20-60, you’re more likely to test a new channel to see whether the audience will convert, rather than paying close attention to audience fit right away. For example, hyper-casual games attract all different types of users, which means they take on less risk testing out new channels with distinct audiences, such as LinkedIn, before making a final decision about audience fit.For apps that attract users with very specific demographics and psychographics, it’s crucial to make sure your audience is reachable through the new channel. For example, an app for photo or music creators will most likely not find their users on a professional networking channel like LinkedIn that typically attracts members of corporate America.2. Does the channel have global reach?If you aren’t thinking about your worldwide footprint, you’re missing out on potential new users. This is why you should also consider whether the channel has global reach and in which countries it’s strongest. This is where your research comes in handy - you can determine the strength of each channel globally by reading case studies, talking to contacts, or even asking nitty gritty questions in the sales pitch.First, determine your target countries according to which countries your app is localized in - this will help you make more informed decisions about the best channels for your app by geo. If your app hasn’t been localized for Spain, for example, advertising on a channel that performs best in Spain may not drive great results.Keep in mind that less global reach may make sense for your UA strategy, too. For example, if your US-based food delivery app is in the process of expanding into Europe but doesn’t have enough delivery drivers yet, it may not be the right time to reach users in that geo through a global channel.3. Is there an overlap between my current channels and the new channel?With an understanding of audience and reach, the next step is comparing this criteria to the channels you’re currently running on. After all, to see incremental growth from a new set of users, you want to make sure you aren’t reaching the same set of users on a few different channels.For example, if you’re already running a campaign on a video sharing platform, such as TikTok, it’s likely those same users will also be on a photo sharing platform, such as Instagram. Ultimately, it’s important to consider whether you want to dedicate cost and resources to a channel where the users overlap with a channel you’re already running on.4. What is the cost commitment?Many channels have hidden fees (setup fee, management fee, etc.) and require large, upfront cost commitments. While you may be prepared to pay the price, it’s still important to know how much of your budget will be allocated to a new channel. In general, it’s best to find channels that allow you to start with a conservative approach before going all in.5. Is the channel a self-serve or managed service?There are benefits to both a self-service and managed service - a self-serve channel means you have full control and transparency into your data and a managed channel means you get personalized recommendations for optimization. Nevertheless, be aware of how much time and resources you’ll have to put into optimizing your new UA channel. If the channel is self-serve - meaning it’s entirely your responsibility to optimize the channel and analyze data - you can then determine whether the channel is worth your time commitment based on the above criteria (users, cost, reach, etc.) Many social and search channels are self-serve, while SDK networks can be as well.If the channel is managed, the account managers at the channel are responsible for working with you to maximize potential and drive stronger performance. You’ll get personalized recommendations without losing control of your strategy. On-device channels, like Aura, are often managed services, as well as SDK networks like ironSource.6. Is the channel integrated with major MMPs?Whether or not the channel is integrated with major MMPs is one of the most important criteria to keep in mind when adding a new channel - since you want to ensure data accuracy, efficiency, and transparency. Being integrated with the top players, such as AppsFlyer, Adjust, Kochava, Singular, Branch, also signifies the channel has a good reputation.7. Are there creative guidelines?Each UA channel will have guidelines for the types of creatives you need and what you’ll be responsible for providing - such as, design specifications and technical requirements for different ad units and placements.This is less of a make or break and more of an important criteria to keep in mind in terms of the resources you’ll need to put into the channel. Many channels rely heavily on creatives while others, like on-device platforms and search solutions, don’t need rich visual ads.Adding a new channel doesn’t have to be daunting if you know what criteria to look for. Ask yourself these 7 important questions before going all in on a new channel and feel confident in the decisions you make for your UA strategy.The Aura answer keyNow let’s apply this approach to Aura. If you were in a demo with Dor, these would be his responses.1. Does the channel fit my target audience?Because every type of demographic owns mobile devices today, you can reach your specific demographic on more than 1B devices.2. Does the channel have global reach?Connect with users on more than 1B devices across 77 countries, through partnerships with premium manufacturers and carriers like Samsung, Vodafone, Orange, and Boost.3. Is there an overlap between my current channels and the new channel?While different audiences prioritize different platforms - for example, Gen X uses Facebook as their leading social platform and Gen Z uses TikTok - the common denominator is that everyone reaches their social channels on their phones. With Aura, you can reach a diverse audience in one place, which leads to less overlap from specific demographic platforms such as TikTok or Snap.4. What is the cost commitment?Aura doesn’t require an up-front payment and has no hidden costs, which means you can test out the channel before going all in. With Aura, you pay on performance.5. Is the channel a self-serve or managed service?Aura is a managed service, which means you’ll get personalized recommendations and support from the Aura team about which touchpoints you should be leveraging. That said, you also get real-time campaign analytics on a dedicated advertiser dashboard.6. Is the channel integrated with major MMPs?Aura is integrated with all the major MMPs - AppsFlyer, Adjust, Kochava, Singular, Branch, and more.Further, looking at MMP reports such as the latest Singular report or AppsFlyer performance index, you’ll see Aura in many top spots. Some notable achievements from Singular’s ROI Index 2022 are top 5 global ad partner, top 5 non-gaming ad partner, and top 5 gaming ad partner.7. Are there creative guidelines?Aura uses the traditional assets used on Google Play, requiring no extra effort from you on the creative side.

With mobile UA constantly evolving (iOS privacy updates as the most recent example), now more than ever - creatives are king. They remain one of the few levers you can still control to get valuable insights into your UA performance. With playables and interactive end cards becoming a critical part of an effective marketing strategy, studios are directing their focus to producing high-quality interactive creatives efficiently giving rise to a new role: the marketing developer.We’ve seen that having a dedicated team member focused on designing and optimizing creatives while working closely alongside other teams can help streamline operations and yield more impactful, high-performing interactive creatives. It’s time for mobile studios of all sizes to understand the what, why, and how of this new role emerging in the mobile marketing space so they can supercharge their UA.What to expect from a marketing developerBecoming a marketing developer requires two key skills not often possessed by a single person. First, a technical coding background in languages like Javascript and HTML5 enables them to construct high-quality, disruptive creative assets on game engines like Unity. And second, they understand how to design and optimize these creatives so they achieve marketing goals.A marketing developer can bring a developer’s perspective and skills to the marketing team and flex their creative abilities at the same timeThat means they can bring a developer’s perspective and skills to the marketing team and flex their creative abilities - all while collaborating with other teams in the organization, too.Why you should hire a dedicated marketing developerToday, most studios either outsource creative production to an agency or have an internal team of designers and developers. So what advantages can an in-house dedicated marketing developer bring?Flexibility and speedFinding your hero creative and unlocking scale faster gives you a competitive advantage in the market. But of course that’s easier said than done. Giving that responsibility to a marketing developer who can take full ownership over playable production in-house, means there’s someone always testing and iterating versions to find those winning creatives more quickly.For example, if you need a developer in your external agency to change the size of the grid in a playable for a merge game - because playables consist of many elements that require coding to adjust - you need to request each of these changes and wait for them to be implemented. Then, you need to test and analyze their impact on performance. This creates a much longer playable production process than having a marketing developer do it internally. With a playable developer in-house, they have the flexibility and autonomy to deliver an asset and optimize it more quickly. Working alongside other teams enhances their flexibility and speed, too. They can work with the games team, for example, to identify the top-performing piece of gameplay and then implement that into a playable.ControlControlling the workflow internally and driving cross-team collaboration boosts efficiency. Creative teams have access to internal data and can work across other teams to improve performance and build an internal knowledge base of best practices.Knowledge is power for an organization. Keeping most of your processes and operations in-house lets you retain all of the information for your own benefit while keeping it from competitors.Knowledge is power for an organization. If most of your processes and operations are in-house, you can retain all of the information for your own benefit while keeping it from competitors. There’s inherent risk in handing control over to an external team, and having a marketing developer in-house reduces this risk and future-proof your business.OperationsSince marketing developers reside in-house, they can work directly alongside other teams to create a seamless feedback loop that improves the entire operation from within. Often, there’s a wall between teams - the UA team, games team, and creative team function in silos. A marketing developer that works across these teams can help break down these walls and encourage more data sharing, communication, and knowledge-building internally. Studios use these learnings to crack the creative code more quickly and easily during new app launches. Plus, the games team benefits by learning what elements are performing well in creatives that could inspire new game features and boost in-game metrics, like retention.How to find the right fitHiring a marketing developer doesn’t mean restructuring an operation - studios hire candidates that are eager to learn and can work well with their existing game engines. Attract strong talent by elevating the role of a marketing developer within your organization. Emphasize their varied responsibilities and the impact they can make across teams: creative, UA, and the games teams.Highlighting the exciting nature of the role and the growth opportunities can attract the right marketing developer to your doorstep.It’s a new and exciting role that can directly impact the bottom line of a business and gives candidates the opportunity to explore many sides of an operation. Highlighting the exciting nature of the role and the growth opportunities can attract the right marketing developer to your doorstep.Ready for impact?Marketing developers work closely across teams to generate high-performing marketing assets, and they should be just as proficient in the analytical side as the coding and design aspects.We’ve seen the impact of bringing on a capable and excited team player. Studios are able to put creative production into overdrive and take advantage of the benefits a marketing developer offers their entire operation. Now it’s your turn: ready to bring on a marketing developer? Tell us about your experience and leave us a comment at our LinkedIn.

Finding success in today’s app landscape depends on making real time, data-driven decisions - that means monitoring new app releases, analyzing KPIs, A/B tests, and segments, and comparing metrics with data captured in the moment.ironSource real time pivot reports let you do just that:Understand trends in real time to recognize opportunities quicklyBreak your data by multiple measures and dimensionsEasily compare different time periodsView data using different visuals, like stack, line chart, bar chart, etc. Get full transparency into ironSource Exchange performance to see which DSPs are contributing to your revenueSo, what can you do to optimize performance with real time pivot reports that you can't with traditional reporting platforms? Let’s look at a few common scenarios.1. Detect changes in performance the moment they happenReacting to performance changes fast can be the difference between earning and losing revenue - and access to data that’s updated in real time lets you do just that.For example, after making changes to your monetization strategy (like adding a new network or releasing a new app version), it’s helpful to swiftly audit the adjustment to ensure it’s working well and not harming any key metrics. If a new network is hurting performance, you can remove it from your strategy immediately or talk to the network directly about the issue, reducing any long term damage. Similarly, it’s important to be on top of your data when something dramatic happens, such as an internet outage or a new campaign set to bring in a large amount of new users. If there’s a decrease in performance, you can start trying to solve the problem right away, comparing metrics against each other to figure out what the problem is. If performance improves, you have a good baseline for the next promotion campaign and can work to improve performance even further. In the image below, revenue spikes for the network in yellow, indicating a dramatic event.The same goes for A/B testing - you can analyze how the A/B test is performing as soon as possible, allowing you to iterate and adjust the test rapidly according to what’s working well for your app. In some cases, tests are very clear and you can make a decision for which iteration to keep and which to kill, fast - speeding up the A/B testing process and enabling you to test more often. Generally speaking, with real time data, you can monitor the environment of your app and ensure it’s stable, every second of every day. With all of this data available at your fingertips, it’s also beneficial to compare metrics, especially revenue, over time.2. Compare revenue over timeIn addition to knowing when performance changes occur, it’s critical to understand why - and getting a clear picture of how your revenue performs over time can help determine the reasons for various drops or increases in performance.  Using a visual format (list, bar chart, table, grid) and choosing various different time frames, you may notice, for example, that revenue drops at 1am every Tuesday. Armed with this information, you won’t be alarmed the next time you notice the decline. On the other hand, if revenue starts spiking when it usually drops, you may want to dive deeper and compare measures.Here’s another scenario. Let’s say you’re looking at revenue by ad unit over time and notice a steep decline for interstitial ads that doesn’t follow the usual trend. To get a better idea of why this may have occurred, you can compare revenue to another measure, such as auctions (ie ad requests), and analyze the graphs directly next to each other.If you notice less traffic coming to your app - which you can measure by monitoring the number of auctions - at the same time there’s a drop in revenue, you may have your answer. In this case, you should analyze the traffic and why you believe it might have dropped - for example, perhaps it’s a holiday and there are fewer people playing. If there are no viable explanations for revenue decline, it may have been due to a technical issue, which means you may want to reach out to the network directly.With this knowledge, you can pinpoint anomalies in revenue and get to the root of them. You can also dive deep into your performance in the waterfall.3. Use CPM buckets to optimize your waterfallCPM buckets show you how much revenue and how many impressions you’re getting from each CPM price range, giving you a more granular idea of how different networks are competing in the waterfall. Typically, you’re only able to see each ad network’s average CPM. While an important metric to keep track of, CPMs can range anywhere from $1 to over $150 - but 2,000 impressions with a $100 CPM results in more revenue than 40,000 impressions of a $3 CPM. Just looking at the average, you don’t get an understanding of distribution across all of the prices.On the other hand, by separating CPM prices into buckets, you know exactly where your impressions and revenue are coming from, allowing you to track and analyze new opportunities. For example, let’s say you see most of your revenue coming from the $10-40 CPM bucket - and by comparing networks within that bucket, you see it’s all coming from a single non-bidding network. If other strong non-bidding networks aren’t providing any revenue in the $10-40 bucket, dig deeper into why. Do you have available instances there for other networks? If not, maybe you should consider adding some. If you do have instances there, do they have low fill rates? If so, you need to work on maximizing placement performance. You can even compare networks directly against each other to determine who is bidding the highest for top CPMs. This will give you an idea of the networks performing best for your app, allowing you to spend time investing in the right resources.Getting access to real time data through real time pivot reporting is a new and granular way to optimize your monetization performance and ensure you’re making the right data-driven decisions for your app. Ultimately, the choice is yours, and it seems pretty obvious. After all, data updated instantaneously is better than data updated every few hours.Learn more about ironSource real time pivot reports here

Mobile phones are central to our digital lives, so any improvement in mobile-related technology is cause for excitement and anticipation - like 5G. In light of this, ironSoure Aura was interested in people’s perception of 5G and how it affects their device experience.In the survey of 10,000 device owners across the US, ironSource Aura found that many customers don’t fully understand the benefits of 5G, let alone the benefits on their current phones with 4G. The lack of awareness surrounding 5G highlights an important opportunity for advertisers looking to reach users on 5G ready phones. Here are the key findings:- 78% expect 5G technology to be better than 4G, but 95% don’t know which 4G benefits are already available on their devices today. - Over 70% express a willingness to pay for the new technology (with payment used as a proxy for perceived value).- 71% find faster download important as a 5G benefitRespondents don’t understand the terms “connectivity”, “capacity”, and “latency” and attribute relatively low value to these benefitsNow, let’s dive into 4 ways advertisers can optimize their 5G strategy.1. Consider the demographics of 5G vs. 4G usersRunning ads on 5G phones, you’re reaching a unique set of users with a different demographic representation than 4G users - meaning you can’t have a one size fits all approach to your strategy. That said, because there are different types of users running on the mobile networks, you can get a better idea of whether your audience is more active on 4G or 5G enabled phones. If the users commonly on 5G don’t have the same demographics as your audience, it may be best to stick with 4G advertising.One of our survey questions asked about the impact of 5G on daily life - 78% of respondents believe that 5G will be better than 4G. While excitement is high, a closer look at demographics revealed that enthusiasm for the new technology varies by age, income, and household size, which signifies who is likely to adopt 5G early on. For example, older respondents place less value on 5G, as the majority of the 55+ group either don’t value the benefits of 5G or don’t know what they are. Higher-income consumers also value 5G more - 54% of those who think that 5G will be better than 4G have an income of $71K or higher. Last, in households with 4 or more people, 47% of the respondents think that 5G will be better than 4G. Conversely, in households with only 1-2 people, 35% of the respondents think that 5G will be better than 4G. Family households are more excited about 5G over 4G.Younger consumers, those living in family households, and higher-income consumers place more value on 5G, which means they’ll have the technology earlier on. If these demographics match your audience, advertising on 5G enabled phones is a good idea. On the other hand, if your audience is older, lower-income and single, you may want to keep your focus on 4G until the new generation is fully rolled out.You also want to consider the types of ads you show to 5G users compared to 4G users, especially considering these users value different things.2. Adjust your creatives for 5G users5G users are unique in terms of how they engage with devices, which can help you tailor your ads to what they’re most excited about. 5G offers multiple tangible benefits, such as downloading a 2-hour long HD movie in about 18 minutes, live streaming a concert or live event to friends or family uninterrupted in HD, or low latency gaming with 30-50 millisecond ping. Why is adjusting your ads to meet users interests especially important for 5G compared to 4G?From downloading movies and music to live streaming and gaming, there’s a strong correlation between user interest and willingness to pay for 5G. Users who have a clear interest in gaming, entertainment, and live streaming are more likely to be willing to pay for 5G technology (92%) and get a 5G ready phone early on compared to the overall average (81%).If your app is not an entertainment, streaming or gaming app, you can still adjust your creatives to appeal to those interests. For example, you can gamify your ads by making them playable and interactive. You can also show short, detailed videos, or films, about your app to appeal to users interested in entertainment. If your app is a gaming, entertainment, or streaming app, you can share how your app is compatible with 5G considering your users will be more interested in the technology - but this isn’t necessarily the case for all users. More on that later.With all of the new updates with 5G, there’s also a huge opportunity to get creative with your ads and innovate with new benefits.3. Serve ads that leverage 5G benefits5G enables advertisers to design more innovative and immersive creatives, enabling users to engage with ads in unique ways. Specifically, the technology promises more connectivity, less latency, faster download, and greater capacity. You’re missing out by not putting time and resources into improving your ad quality and creativity leveraging these benefits.In fact, 78% of respondents expect 5G technology to be better than 4G and 70% express a willingness to pay for the benefits of 5G. This means that when users see their first ad on 5G, they may expect it to be optimized with the benefits, creating a positive experience.Less latency opens up countless opportunities to create real, immersive on-device ad experiences. You can show full screen ads that allow users to see what a character or product looks like in different environments that you can design and adjust directly from the creative. You can also use VR to show a 360-degree view of a gaming or social world. With greater capacity, ads can also come in many different audio and video formats. For example, you can allow users to stream tons of content from your ad, such as audiobooks or files.There is immense untapped potential of 5G technology, and you should be dedicated to finding new ways to engage users with your ads. Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean you should fill your ads with confusing 5G terminology.4. Don’t talk about the 5G benefitsUnless your users are highly interested in gaming, entertainment or streaming as mentioned above, it’s better to not overflow your ads with 5G terminology or explanations of the technology. In fact, doing so could have a harmful effect on your engagement. This is because, despite the anticipation of the upcoming 5G rollout, there is a lack of understanding of the key benefits of the new technology.Most device owners don’t understand the terms “connectivity”, “capacity”, and “latency” and attribute relatively low value to these benefits, perhaps because of a lack of understanding. On top of that, only 5% of respondents realize what’s already available on their phones with 4G technology.This means you should be careful about how you discuss 5G in your ads - you don’t want to push users away by confusing them. If you plan to talk about 5G, be sure to explain the benefits in terms that are more relatable. For example, say “time it takes to download” instead of “latency,” and “amount of space” instead of capacity. You also want to explain the benefits in context, in terms of mobile gaming, for example.5G represents a massive opportunity for your on-device advertising strategy, but you don’t want to dive in head first without understanding some key differences compared to 4G. With some key insights into demographic differences, user interests, and awareness of 5G benefits, you can be better equipped to reach 5G ready phones effectively. Read the report.

With 5G a hot topic today, ironSource Aura was interested in people’s perception of 5G, how they see it affecting their device experience, and how the telecom industry can leverage this exciting rollout.We surveyed 10,000 people in the United States who are currently using a mobile device and network that’s 5G compatible - and found that while consumers express enthusiasm about 5G, many don’t understand some of its main benefits. In fact, in many cases, features that consumers are looking forward to with 5G, are ones they already have today with 4G, without realizing it. Here are some of the highlights: 78% of respondents expect 5G technology to be better than 4G. However, 95% of respondents don’t know which 4G benefits are already on their devices today. Consumers are very excited about the upcoming rollout of 5G, with over 70% expressing a willingness to pay for the new technology (with payment used as a proxy for perceived value).But while people look forward to faster downloads, many don’t understand the other key benefits, including “connectivity”, “capacity”, and “latency” and attribute relatively low value to these benefits.The enthusiasm for the new technology varies by demographic: Younger consumers, those living in family households, and higher-income consumers place more value on 5G compared to their older, lower income, or smaller household counterparts. Users who have a clear interest in gaming, entertainment, and live streaming are more likely to be willing to pay for 5G (92%) versus the overall average (81%).The lack of clarity behind 5G represents a huge opportunity for telecom operators to improve the user experience and build loyalty and trust - by communicating the benefits of 5G and highlighting the real-life value of high-speed mobile data, especially by user segment.Read the full report

Building innovative technologies which anticipate the needs of our partners is a key pillar in our product philosophy. It’s how we stay agile and ensure we’re always delivering value, helping our partners optimize their growth strategies. Often, that means being first to market with exclusive features and products that are only available on our mediation platform, ironSource LevelPlay.Through the years, many of these innovations (cohort reports, ILR, monetization A/B testing, ad-based ROAS optimizer, and user activity reports) have been adopted as standard features in mediation platforms across the market. Here are 6 more innovations that are exclusive to ironSource and help our partners grow their app businesses.1. App analyticsThe synergy between monetization and marketing teams is critical to any app’s growth - which is why we innovated products like ILR and an ad-based ROAS optimizer. Now, we’re taking this trend one step further with app analytics - focusing on the product and developer teams, and connecting them to monetization and user acquisition. Perhaps the most exciting project we’ve worked on lately, app analytics provides granular reporting on 360 app performance beyond monetization, including app-focused metrics like session length, playtime, and level completions. Together, the product, monetization, and marketing teams can use ironSource app analytics to solve complex business problems like:How does user playtime correlate to number of impressions?How does average session length correlate to the win percentage of the auction?Where in the user journey should you add a new ad placement?Do retained users spend more on in-app purchases?2. Real time pivot reportsIn general, we put a huge emphasis on innovating deep reporting products within LevelPlay because we see that reliable reporting is crucial to an app’s success - only with a granular yet comprehensive view of your app business can you make the best decisions to optimize your growth strategy.Now, with real time pivot reports, developers get even deeper insights, which they can slice and dice and visualize - all in real time. The real time aspect is a huge innovation which will have an instant impact on success, as seeing performance changes immediately on the dashboard (due to a new app version, changes in the waterfall, etc) can help you iterate and improve your growth strategy faster. In addition, developers can: - Easily compare time frames on one dashboard- Drill all the way down to the hour- Slice data using dimensions unavailable anywhere else, such as CPM buckets- Visualize the data (bar charts, bubble charts, tables, heatmaps, grids, line charts, and more)- Download data in one-click- Break down multiple dimensions at the same time (for example, instance country breakdown) Here are a few tips and best practices for optimizing performance with real time pivot reports.3. Cross promotion bidding networkTo date, the available cross promotion solutions in the market have zero optimization mechanism behind them - either developers place cross promotion campaigns in their waterfall as a line item, as lower-quality backfill, or even as a dedicated ad format. No matter the strategy - there’s no machine learning or optimization algorithm behind them, which makes it challenging, if not impossible, to ensure you’re getting the ROAS you want.Understanding the challenges, and anticipating that cross promotion would become a critical part of developers’ growth success (especially considering the explosion of hyper-casual and the iOS privacy updates), we built a cross promotion bidding network.Essentially, developers get their own bidding network, which only runs your campaigns on your apps. This way, you can run and optimize cross promotion campaigns like any other ad source, according to the CPI and ROAS targets you want - with its position in the waterfall set according to real performance that leverages machine learning and data science. You can learn more about our cross promotion bidding network and how it works here.4. Zero latency with progressive loadingGiven its negative impact on user experience, retention, app ratings and revenue, the industry is constantly looking for ways to reduce latency between rewarded videos, generally the strongest performing ad unit for app monetization. There are a few ways to do this: only show a traffic driver when there’s an ad ready to display, show a pop up apologizing for the empty ad space, or run a super tight waterfall. But even these strategies end up damaging the user experience, ARPDAU, or both.Developers shouldn’t have to compromise on either. That’s why we innovated progressive loading, a mechanism built into our ad serving logic which ensures that there is always a rewarded video ad available to show, with no delay in filling an ad space, and causing the user to stare at a blank screen. Check out this piece of mine about progressive loading and how to optimize your rewarded video strategy for maximum impact.5. SegmentsIn addition to giving users a better rewarded video ad experience with progressive loading, we built segmentation capabilities directly into ironSource LevelPlay, to give users the best ad experience in general - enabling developers to tailor ad experience for different groups of users with little to no operational work. In fact, building the product, we made sure to give our partners access to as many, if not all, segmentation use cases possible, including: - Overriding capping and pacing per segment- Setting a waterfall per segment (for example, paying users vs non-paying users, IDFA users vs. non-IDFA users, etc) - Reporting on revenue per segment- Breaking down cohort data per segmentToday, we’re raising the bar with dynamic segmentation, which gives even more control and agility to publishers building their ad experience, by adjusting the segments throughout the user session. This product can be used in various ways - such as adjusting waterfall strategies, changing the ad experience, and more.See how to build a segmentation strategy that boosts revenue.6. Mobile appFinally, there’s our mobile app - which is the first and only mobile version of a mediation platform available today. Today, a game’s success is determined by metrics that need to be constantly tracked and analyzed - and staying on top of data in real time is critical to making the right business decisions. But of course, developers aren’t always sitting at their desks to hop onto the desktop version of their mediation platform. We released the ironSource mobile app to give developers an instant and digestible view of business performance, both for monetization and user acquisition, empowering their partners to react quickly to changes in the data.Going forwardAs the year continues, we plan to release many more first-to-market, exclusive LevelPlay products, all designed to help our partners dominate the charts and optimize growth - so be sure to check back in on what’s coming down the pipeline.

With MoPub announcing their platform’s sunset, many developers are looking for an alternative mediation provider that they can trust to always put their interests and needs first. For any developer who hasn’t been with us for the last 8 years, we wanted to introduce ironSource LevelPlay, our mediation platform, and share our product philosophy as well as our upcoming roadmap and features.Product philosophyWhen we first built our mediation platform in 2013, our goal was to enable app developers to maximize their ad monetization potential. We anticipated that not only was ad monetization going to grow in importance as a meaningful revenue stream for app developers, but that managing it was going to become increasingly complex and challenging.Fast forward, and the App Economy opportunity was growing at an incredible rate - especially for games - and the sophistication of app-based businesses would need to grow too. We quickly understood that in order to really maximize their ad revenue, developers would need to be able to leverage additional tools and products.This became the North Star of our product roadmap: anticipating the technology needed to efficiently and successfully grow an app business - innovative technology that goes beyond the current state of play - and then building best-in-class products to do just that. Philosophy in actionBy following this principle, ironSource was first-to-market with multiple products designed to help app developers optimize their monetization activities. Today, we’re proud to see many of these innovations come as standard in any mediation platform, including:User activity reports (think DAU, ARPDEU, ER, etc) for a deeper look at app usage and ad engagement trendsMonetization A/B testing suite that offers 3 tools which enable developers to make data-driven decisions on their monetization strategy, helping them yield even better performanceProgressive loading: More recently, after understanding the amount of developers struggling to deal with rewarded video latency, we were the first to build a solution that enables zero latency into our ad serving logic that works without any input needed from the developer.Perhaps the best example of our philosophy in action came when we anticipated that ad monetization would need to be treated just like in-app purchases for developers to truly maximize their growth. That’s why we were the first to build our platform in a way that links both sides of the app growth lifecycle, from user growth to ad monetization. Before these products, there was virtually no synergy between monetization and user acquisition within the industry:Impression-level revenue which was the first in the industry to let developers accurately measure ad revenue on the impression level, and link that data to the marketing channel responsible for that specific impression Automated ROAS optimizer which leverages ad revenue and in-app purchase data to maximize scale while reaching a campaign’s ROAS goalCohort reports that give developers a deeper understanding of how their user base engages with ad monetization throughout their lifetimeCross promotion solution which functions as a bidding network that only runs cross promotion campaigns, enabling monetization managers to run cross promotion campaigns in a way intended to maximize eCPM, and user acquisitions managers to bid on CPI rather than CPMironSource LevelPlay product roadmap: Looking aheadIn the last few months we’ve released a handful of exciting projects, and have many more coming through the pipeline - all of which were built anticipating market needs and designed to help app developers continue optimizing their app businesses. In addition, following conversations with MoPub publishers moving to ironSource LevelPlay, many of these features were built with them in mind, in order to close the gap between the products they’ve become accustomed to:MoPub migration tool (already live): Following the rapid sunset of MoPub, we’ve been working closely with MoPub publishers to make their migration to ironSource LevelPlay as seamless as possible. Now we’re giving developers everywhere the same capabilities many others have already successfully used - by enabling seamless migration to ironSource LevelPlay mediation. Custom adapters (already live) gives developers the flexibility to integrate any SDK network they want into ironSource LevelPlay auction, and receive the same level of reporting, testing and optimization they get with every other network. ironSource Exchange (already live), powered by Open Measurement and smart caching capabilities, connects developers with the industry’s top performance and brand DSPs. This project took three years to perfect, and now advanced features like direct-sold campaigns, PMPs, and tags, which have been used by mediation partners for years, are even more accessible and easy to use. Performance improvements for banners and MRECs (already live) such as adding dynamic sizes, higher bidding density generated by more buyers.Ad quality (already live), a product that shows developers exactly which ads are running on their app and the effect they have on key metrics like churn and revenue. With 2022 around the corner, here’s a glance at the projects we’re currently working on:App Analytics (coming): Perhaps the most exciting project we’ve been working on, our App Analytics solution - intended to be one of the most comprehensive in the industry - will not only improve collaboration between monetization and marketing managers but also product managers, by providing granular reporting on app performance. Real-Time Pivot (coming): Transparency and democratizing access to data has informed much of our product development. From conversations with partners, we’ve understood that many developers lack the ability to analyze their data in real time, slice and dice it as they want, and easily compare it with historical data - which is planned to be available on ironSource LevelPlay in the coming weeks. More and better bidding networks (coming): Understanding that more competition means more revenue for our partners, we always make it a priority to onboard as many networks as possible to our mediation - with Yahoo, Vungle, and Pangle being a few recent examples. Currently, we’re working closely with several networks, both existing and new, to onboard them to in-app bidding and improve performance for developers. The biggest evidence of success here is the feedback we receive from networks that their bidding adoption on ironSource LevelPlay is significantly higher than other platforms. By mid 2022, we aim to have 20 bidding networks available. Advanced A/B testing capabilities (coming): We’re continuing in our effort to go beyond the status quo, and will soon introduce new automation tools that will give developers even more options for optimization - for example, automatically serving the ad experience that generates the highest ARPDAU and best UX. Open source adapters (coming): Many leading developers have made it clear that the flexibility and control that comes with open source adapters is critical to their success - we’ve already started working on this exciting project, and expect to ship it soon. Native ads and rewarded interstitials (coming): To fully round out the ad units available on ironSource LevelPlay, we’re planning to offer rewarded interstitial and native ads, along with leading SDK bidding networks and dynamic setup so developers can better control these important ad units. Real-time reporting on ironSource Exchange: As we’re expanding the capabilities of ironSource Exchange, we’re working on giving developers full transparency into DSP performance, with a real-time reporting dashboard. By building technologies that go beyond the state of play, not only are developers able to scale their app businesses in the most efficient way possible, it also helps grow the ecosystem as a whole. The more money developers are able to generate from their apps, the more they can invest in growth. The more profitably they grow, the more money they have to reinvest in growth or development of new titles.To learn more about the products we build and the philosophy behind them, get in touch or check out our mediation platform.

It’s crucial to remember that when designing your app’s onboarding experience, you’re dealing with real people testing a new product - it’s both an emotional and rational experience. By participating in your app’s onboarding, users are trusting you to guide them through an experience that is both safe and valuable. And if users aren’t happy, you can bet, with 80% confidence, they won’t be back, according to Quettra software.To ensure long term monetary growth, you should be heavily investing in perfecting your onboarding experience. After all, even in the App Economy, first impressions are everything. Or Shahar, US General Manager at ironSource, shares his viewpoint on why app onboarding is so important and how you can perfect it.Why perfecting the onboarding experience is critical for your monetization strategyApp onboarding is crucial to ensuring you’ll see high retention and conversions in the short and long term, leading to more revenue. But, why?Convert more users into subscribersThe reality is that most users convert into subscribers during the onboarding experience. This is because the onboarding experience is a user’s first impression of your app and they’re overloaded with all the ways they can get value. By investing in the onboarding experience, users are enticed to convert right away.Ultimately, by not optimizing your onboarding experience, you’re leaving money on the table - if conversions to subscriptions are already highest during onboarding, imagine how much higher they could be with some tweaking and testing. If your app requires users to subscribe to continue using the app, the onboarding experience is your only shot at converting users into revenue for your app. Optimizing your onboarding experience is also important to improving the engagement of subscribers - for example, extending session length, increasing the number of features used, etc. - and keeping them as subscribers for a long time.Ensure ongoing app usage to monetize laterFor users who don’t convert into subscribers during the onboarding experience, the only way to monetize them is making sure they continue using the free version of your app. That’s why creating a value driven onboarding experience that gives users a first glance into why your app will benefit them and how to use it, is critical at this stage, as it will foster ongoing user engagement. It can also be the difference between a user upgrading to a subscription plan or leaving your app in the future - first impressions are lasting impressions.With 21% of users abandoning an app after one use according to upland, you can be doing more during onboarding to keep users around, so that you can maximize the value of each user later on. After all, onboarding is about developing a mutually beneficial relationship between you and your users that keeps users around while increasing your revenue.Better understand your audienceThe onboarding process encompasses many screens, some with valuable information about your app, others with places for users to talk about themselves and how they plan to interact with your app. For example, a leading meditation app prompts users to select what they are looking for in the app, such as better sleep, reduced stress, etc. A language learning app asks users about the time they expect to spend in the app.Asking the right questions and getting to know your users will help you create a great user experience - which includes an ad placement strategy for non-subscribers. To make the most out of your ad strategy, you should start thinking about your ad placements from day one and think carefully about the questions you ask during onboarding. If you do this right, you can see incremental revenue implementing ads in your app.3 tips to optimizing your onboarding experienceWith many apps beginning to realize the immense opportunity that the onboarding experience brings to your monetization strategy, it’s time to start thinking about how you can optimize yours. Here are some best practices for app developers of all sizes.1. Help users understand your value propositionYour onboarding experience is like an ad for your product, but you only have one shot to sell it. Thinking about it this way, you should spend considerable time determining your main selling point and what you want to highlight that differentiates you from competitors.First, consider what users may already know about your app. Naturally, some apps are more popular and well known than others. Through segmentation, you may find that certain users know the concept of your app before download, which means you can consider letting them skip parts of onboarding to improve their experience. At the end of the day, this doesn’t mean you can slack off on portraying your value. For example, a well known meditation app doesn’t need to spell out what they do. To portray value, the first screen of their onboarding experience asks users to “take a deep breath.” From the second users open the app, they are reaping the benefits of the app.For apps that are less well known, portraying value doesn’t necessarily mean getting granular into the bells and whistles of your app’s mechanics. After all, people care about how your app will make their lives better or easier, which makes your word-by-word value proposition important to lead with. For example, an app that allows users to compare gas prices begins the onboarding experience explaining just that.To create a more memorable experience that sticks with users, try offering something tangible at the end of the onboarding experience, such as an edited photo, insights into the users personal weight loss plan, etc. Portraying value comes down to being creative and using your onboarding screens wisely to show users why and how your app is valuable to them.2. Show features that create a ‘winning experience’Once you’ve shown the value of your app, the next step is showing users how they can get the value by using your core features. The goal is to create a ‘winning experience’ for your users - in the world of apps, this means showing users what they can ‘win,’ or create, with your app. What constitutes as a ‘win’ is going to differ for every app according to user preferences and motivation to engage. Deciding what to show is especially important for subscription apps where some features are locked behind the subscription wall. The key is to find the right balance between showing too many and too few features, and how many of those would be free to use vs. paid, while still helping users understand what they can create - an edited photo, cropped video, etc. - or win - a horoscope read, weight loss plan, etc. - with your app.For apps that have shorter LTVs, such as some photo editing apps, try being aggressive with the amount of premium features you’re showing during onboarding - you don’t have to worry about churn as much. You can then take users to a subscription signup screen. This is a way of softly leading users to convert on day one.On the other hand, for apps users spend considerable time in, you don’t want to push potential long term users out of the app during their first impression, so, it’s best to stick to a few important features. You can even offer users the option to sign up for a free trial.The amount of features you show and how aggressive you are about encouraging users to subscribe depends heavily on the behavior in your app. To be sure of what works best for you, start A/B testing.3. A/B test the experienceA lot can go into the onboarding experience - install events, subscription events, tutorials, feature screens, free trial offers, etc. How the experience starts and ends, and the number of screens in the middle, is going to differ for every single app. This is why you should be A/B testing your experience as opposed to imitating. Learn which other A/B tests you absolutely need to run to increase revenue.First, map the engagement of each onboarding event, which will help you determine the screens users are enjoying the most and understand preliminary performance. From there, there are countless A/B tests you can run to perfect your strategy.For example, you can test how aggressive your experience is, how many features you’re showing, your value proposition, and more. A wellness app tested showing 50% of users 5 features and showing 50% of users 6 features. For all you know, this small difference can either retain or churn your first time users.It’s also relevant to test user behavior after completing the onboarding experience. For instance, you can test whether offering users a feature during the onboarding experience and then locking it a few days after the user enters the app will encourage that user to convert to a subscriber.When looking at the onboarding experience, testing potential is endless. To get as close to perfection as possible and see long term revenue growth, it’s best to invest heavily in A/B testing your experience.The importance of the onboarding experience can’t be overstated - it’s the users first impression of your app and it sets the stage for how they’ll engage with your app throughout their lifetime. Putting resources into testing the experience is crucial to your monetary success in both the short and long term - you want to find the optimal version that is both informative and fun for users to engage with. Get ahead of your competitors and start perfecting your strategy to see optimal results.

Foldable smartphones, which are smartphones with a folding dynamic, represent an opportunity to reinvent what on-device advertising can be for advertisers. Developed out of a desire to create the biggest screen that can still fit in your pocket, foldable phones are the latest trend in innovative technology. In fact, half of US consumers are either very (16%) or somewhat (34%) interested in buying a foldable phone as their next device according to CNET. Additionally, according to the same survey, 52% of Samsung owners are interested and 47% of iPhone owners are interested, which is a sizable portion of Apple users.With hardware and software advances creating more advanced folds, foldable phones will only continue to evolve. As advertisers, these devices represent a valuable channel to reach a rich, growing demographic of users on prime real estate. Let’s face it, the future is folding.Here are some reasons why foldable phones represent a major opportunity for your advertising strategy:1. Take advantage of the screen designFoldable phones are best known for their adjustable screen sizes, which allow for flexible usage as well as significant ad opportunities. The Samsung Galaxy Fold, for example, has a typical sized screen on one side and a camera on the other. When unfolded horizontally, the screen becomes the size of a tablet. The Galaxy Flip unfolded is the size of a traditional phone, but when folded vertically, becomes a square. So, what does this mean for your on-device advertising strategy?First, it means new engaging ad creatives that leverage the unique folding format. For example, you could design ads that allow users to reveal more ad content as they fold or unfold their devices, like origami. Or you could offer options like, “unfold for more info” or “fold to see more.” This way, the fold becomes a tool to keep users engaged and entertained.Second, you can design more detailed ad creatives due to the larger screen sizes - since you have more room to fill your ad with important information that will catch the users' attention. Ultimately, the content you would’ve had to separate into two ads on traditional phones can now fit into one ad on foldable phones - more bang for your buck!Last, the folding feature on the Galaxy Flip lends itself nicely to push notifications. When the phone is folded into a square, the cover screen is prime real estate for notifications or app previews. Users can seamlessly tap your app notification on the cover screen and then unfold their phone directly into the app or app store. Users also see the same notifications when they unfold their phones to the lock screen, meaning users will see your notification not once but twice.On top of the design of the phones, foldables represent a turning point in the mobile industry.2. Meet users at the center point of their digital livesThe key to running a successful campaign is reaching users where they’re most engaged. With foldable phones changing the way we work and interact with our phones, making it easier to complete certain tasks that weren’t always optimized for mobile channels, consumers are going to start spending more time on these devices compared to others, representing a valuable opportunity for your on-device app advertising strategy.Years ago, desktops became the center of our digital lives in terms of capabilities, replacing the TV and landline. To order an advertised product, consumers would have to call the number on the screen during a commercial. As the internet became more accessible and computers gained popularity, online ordering became the norm and computers were optimized for most day to day digital tasks.Today, foldable phones are replacing the computer as the center point of our digital lives. These devices are able to adapt to fit users’ needs at any moment and entertainment and productivity capabilities are being optimized to work on foldables. For example, office and design products, such as Word and Adobe, work well on foldables because there’s more room to write and create. Further, while users once booked travel plans through desktops because of the bigger screen to see more booking options at once, users are able to see the same amount of options through foldable phones. Entertainment apps even have a leg up with foldables. For example, if you need subtitles when watching a video, users no longer have to worry about the words taking up the whole screen as they do on traditional phones.With foldable phones allowing users to do more, advertising on foldables is a great way to reach a powerful set of users that are likely using their phones more than they ever have before. It’s also a valuable opportunity to show how your app will be optimized for these devices. For example, if you’re a music streaming app, you can advertise how you now offer a “karaoke” feature where users can read the lyrics on their foldable screens and sing along. After all, users will engage with your app differently on foldables compared to traditional phones, and it’s important to show how.Even more so, the users on foldable phones, today, are incredibly valuable. 3. Reach the early adopters of the mobile industryAny time a device enters the market, especially a new generation of devices, you can expect consumers to flock to the stores, intrigued and excited for what’s new and innovative. But foldables are still a fairly niche technology, meaning that the consumers purchasing foldables are early adopters with high tech awareness - the most influential demographic of users.With 29% of users saying that the tech’s cool factor is driving their interest and 25% saying the uniqueness is a selling feature according to YouGovAmerica, it’s clear that foldable phone users are highly interested in the innovation and growth of the mobile industry. As early adopters, these users are optimists, overlooking challenges of being the first to jump into a new technology, and influencers, looking to share their reviews. This demographic also tends to have high disposable income, well-informed and are from higher social statuses, which means they have significant thought leadership.Ultimately, the users on foldable phones, today, are incredibly excited to start using their new phones, discover new content, and download new apps. They’re also prepared to share their thoughts and reviews, which means you’ll will be in front of industry authorities and experts ready to talk about your app. For all you know, these early adopters may mention your app as the next big thing in their next Facebook post.Meet foldable phone users directly on their devices with AuraFoldable phones aren’t going anywhere any time soon, but there’s no better time to start advertising directly on these unique devices. After all, getting on foldable phones as soon as possible means you’ll be reaching the quality users, today, and master your strategy for the growing audience of the future.

ironSource sat down with Evgeny Grishakov, CEO at Garden of Dreams, an indie game studio based out of Moscow, to find out how his studio approaches game development and creating a winning title. Read on to learn some best practices for growing your app business and bringing in more users.What kind of games does Garden of Dreams make? Can you explain your business model?Overall, Garden of Dreams has an unusual business model. While we started out like all game studios - developing a variety of games trying to find the niche that would let us make the most money - we eventually realized that none of our team members had any experience in game growth. In the beginning, we released five games and all of them had almost no revenue - complete failures.I soon realized that to succeed in game development, our team needed to learn more about the industry. We started a YouTube channel to interview successful game developers and we are still posting videos today.We soon managed to make a game, Offline Dice, that brought in a lot of revenue. We developed it for nine months before selling it. When we talked about the sale on our YouTube channel, other developers began contacting us for help selling their games. We started bringing buyers and sellers together in the game development market.Most importantly, we buy games ourselves, improve and develop them, and increase their revenue.You’re the CEO of Garden of Dreams. How and why did you get into developing games?Game development started as a hobby for me. I was working during the day and developing Flash games in the evenings. I even released three games that brought in some revenue.Five years later, I sat down and began to think: what do I want to do for the next 10 years? What will make me happy and use my best qualities?On December 31, 2019, I decided - game development!How does Garden of Dreams balance monetization between IAPs and ads? Walk us through your monetization strategy.As a rule, we always put in-app purchases first. One of our main goals when developing a game is to find ways to integrate IAPs harmoniously so that players are likely to buy them. However, many genres focus on advertising alone - I would guess that about 75% of games in the store are focused purely on advertising.This is why we decided to learn more about implementing and monetizing with advertising, and how we started working with ironSource. By integrating ironSource’s mediation solution into our very first project, we managed to increase the income per user 2X. Cool!What channels do you use for user acquisition? Tell us about your UA strategy.We’ve just started mastering our UA strategy. Today, we are buying US players - some Spanish speaking - and constantly doing CPI tests for new games.Since we are newbies, we generate most of our downloads through TikTok videos - we have a mini-department of content makers who shoot, edit and publish videos on TikTok.Are there any game development or growth trends that you are excited about?On the other hand, it seems to me that there’s a trend to build more communication between the studio and the players. In fact, players are starting to want to participate in the development of the games, share their ideas, become testers, and help the game in every way outside of just playing! This is the coolest and most valuable thing in game development - to create communities of people around the game.What advice would you give to other indie developers trying to make a quality game?I would recommend getting to know some colleagues around you - find some games that interest you and reach out to the developers. Gaming is a very friendly and open industry. I try to help all the developers who reach out to me because I also needed some guidance at the start and talking to experienced industry leaders, I managed to immediately make a successful project.Covering ironSource mediation for newcomers from A to ZCheck out this video Evgeny made about ironSource mediation.

Let’s face it - not every one of your game’s creatives is going to have a sky-high IPM and drive quality users by the thousands. As Creative Lead at ironSource, I’ve helped design and launch enough creatives to recognize not all of them are hits. But, I’ve learned to celebrate these failures and learn from them - doing so gets you closer to unlocking the secret sauce of success. Even those who don’t feel they have creativity running through their veins can still crack creatives and help a game scale quickly and profitably. Here’s a framework for doing just that so you can gather and apply the learnings that optimize your game’s creative strategy.Step 1: Start chewing over the dataBefore you start building a great creative, you need a marketable concept - this starts by analyzing data to determine what’s performing well and what areas need improvement. We’ve broken down three ways you can approach creative thinking and how to use performance metrics to back up your decisions:Current top-performers, future playablesWhen designing your video creatives, test a few versions that highlight different parts of your game, like the core mechanic, metagame, and other relevant parts. Analyze each of these themes by looking at performance KPIs like IPM and CVR and quality metrics like retention and ROAS so you can confirm what aspects and themes are resonating with your users. Then you can take these top-performers and adapt them into an engaging and interactive creative, like a playable. Spoiler alert: At the end of this process, measure your playable’s performance by looking at in-game metrics to see how well your creative attracted quality users.Embrace your inner sonar by tracking industry trendsIf your gameplay is the foundation for your creative concept, you can build another layer by applying trends in the industry and in your game’s genre. Trends perform well because users are familiar with them and they already have a track record of success.The first version of the creative for the game Wheel Scale by Supersonic used a drag mechanic. In the sixth version, it was swapped for a drawing mechanic because this was trending in the top charts. The creative with the drawing mechanic achieved 45% more scale, a 5% higher IPM, and boosted CVR by 34% - and importantly, all while keeping LTV stable, which indicated the quality of the users was still high even as the mechanic in the creative changed.Think like a game designerGame designers prioritize gameplay and staying true to the core concept as they brainstorm new ways to level up in the next update. Stepping out of the shoes of a creative designer and into those of a game designer can help you meld the two worlds - creativity and hooking users with gameplay. As you adopt this new perspective for your creative strategy, you can come up with a new hook that entices users while highlighting the core mechanic. For example, if you have a match-3 mechanic and a bakery theme, you can introduce a storyline in your creative around building up your bakery and feature a Muffin Woman character while showing actual gameplay. Now, your ad appeals to users who enjoy a story-based game, like a bakery theme, and play match-3 games. Hold up: If your game doesn’t have a bakery theme, this tip still applies to you. This theme in your creatives could be something that resonates with your users - try testing it as a wild card before implementing it into your game.Analyzing the impact of these three approaches comes down to looking at the data. With each tweak to your creatives, check the KPIs, apply your learnings to each variation, and optimize as you work towards uncovering your game’s secret sauce. We’re going to get into this more soon, but keep in mind that this cycle of learning and optimizing is an endless process - you should design new creatives and measure their impact continuously.The next part of the framework is all about executing and optimizing after getting into the creative mindset.Step 2: Time to improve performanceWhen first launching your UA campaign, you can’t know for sure what creatives are going to succeed - even someone with decades of experience in the industry can’t know with certainty what’s going to work. Take our creative team, for example: Many of us have been designing creatives for years and years, but we still place friendly bets about which iteration will perform best because the results can always surprise us until we finish running the test.Great execution comes down to macro A/B tests that compare the impact of making a drastic change to your creatives and micro decisions that change small details. Designing many iterations that initially change large aspects then making minor tweaks ensures you’re testing as much as possible and gathering data to optimize efficiently while not missing out on an opportunity to give your creative performance a boost. Let’s start with the macro changes.Go big: A/B test major elementsWhile small tweaks can help you quickly fine-tune creatives, macro A/B tests can unlock success by changing a big part of the design. Some common examples of major features to change include the lead character (female vs. male, animal vs. human), level difficulty, and camera angle. Just because it’s a big change doesn’t mean it necessarily takes too much time or resources to test - you can test many of these features directly through Unity.One of the elements that we often A/B test is the beginning of the funnel - the tutorial screen - which is essential for attracting and engaging users. Idle Barber Shop Tycoon from Codigames demonstrates this type of macro decision in action. We tested two different versions of the tutorial in the playable - one that highlights the barbershop environment and another that leverages a trend of showing characters with strong expressions by having users wake up the sleeping hairdresser. The version that used the sleeping character earned a 60% engagement rate compared to the 54% ER of the other creative. This iteration attracted potential players with a visual hook that reduced user reaction times (time to engage) by 33% - it became the winning version and achieved over 100 million impressions.Making both micro decisions and macro changes then analyzing the impact can help you make more efficient and impactful decisions as you iterate on your creatives. Knowing exactly what worked - and what didn’t - helps you identify the opportunities for optimizing creatives and, in turn, gameplay. You can close the loop of UA and monetization by integrating the concept or feature that performed well from your playable into your build. To know if your change made an impact on monetization and game performance, track its impact by looking at in-game metrics.Refine the little thingsIn the past, creative teams thought their work was complete when they finished designing and launching an ad set. Now, you can’t head to the beach the moment your creative goes live - it’s a cycle of crunching the numbers and optimizing performance so you get the most out of your creative strategy. Use in-ad metrics like engagement rate and drop-off to pinpoint parts of your interactive creative that are failing and then make small quick tweaks to improve performance. Not every creative is going to help you scale exponentially from the get-go, but each creative does contain important information about performance and what’s working with your users. Recognizing what pieces of the creative are failing can help you quickly identify and adjust them to try and unlock scale.Let’s say a playable ad of yours isn’t scaling well. Looking at the data, you notice users are dropping off quickly or failing the game in the first few seconds - this could indicate it’s too short and/or challenging. So you add a feature to increase the duration of gameplay and give users an automatic extra life so they don’t immediately fail. Now they play all the way through to the end card, feel less frustrated (although striking the right balance of frustration can be a very strong feeling to motivate them to keep playing), and want to download your game and keep playing all night.Small changes can create a sense of urgency, too - a trend we’re seeing that encourages engagement as users feel compelled to overcome the challenge and beat the level shown in the creative. You can accomplish this by adding features like a timer, showing characters asking for help or panicking, including a red flashing border, or increasing speed. To see if a quick tweak like this worked, look at your data and check if it boosted key metrics like engagement rate, CVR, and IPM.Finding your secret sauceEach game is going to have its own recipe for the secret sauce of creative success - it depends on your genre, concept, and specific elements within your game. But if you approach your creative strategy in a way that focuses on testing and iterating then analyzing the data to help you extract a hook, you can find your unique recipe and unlock scale into the long-term. With each successful campaign, gather insights and build a knowledge center that you can apply to your next set of creatives. While every game’s user acquisition strategy will need to strike a different balance between the creative, the bid, and user quality, you can more easily find this formula by applying your learnings from previous campaigns.Editor’s note: This article is based on the exclusive presentation that Creative Lead at ironSource Elad Gabison gave at the virtual LevelUp 2021 conference. Check out the video from LevelUp 2021 below.

Get to know Virede, the two-person game studio based in Ukraine and the developers behind Idle Law Firm. Hear directly from Serhiy Kozachuk and Alex Kozachuk and learn all about their game developer journey - from hyper-casual to idle - and how they teamed up with ironSource to boost app revenue 100%. Check out the Q&A below.How and why did you first get started in gaming?We're a small studio. It's only a two-person studio, me and my brother, and we’ve worked together for seven or eight years. We started as freelance developers, and eventually found the world of games. We just jumped into the hyper-casual space before moving to idle games and have worked with a lot of the biggest publishers out there on both the iOS and Android store.How long does it take you to build a game from concept to production?For our last game, it took us 3-4 months of development from ideation to going live. We then spent one month testing in Canada and Great Britain. It was pretty hard for us to scale the game and our ad spend because we were new to the space.With ironSource, we used the tCPI optimizer and liked it a lot because it does the job automatically for us. We don't need to spend our hours and time manually managing all the campaigns and their performance.What was the main challenge you faced in growing your game?We worked with App Store and Google Play store algorithms for a while, but they are pretty tricky since you don't always know what’s the best strategy to implement. We don't have much experience in marketing, so it's pretty hard to know where to spend your budget, how to spend your budget, is it best to grow your game in the first few days or just to have a small incremental growth?Why did you partner with ironSource?We decided to just keep our studio small and instead spend our resources on marketing and monetization. We tried ironSource - and we were amazed because we worked with a lot of other mediation solutions and ad networks, but we got frustrated every time we’d try to implement something or add something new. With ironSource, we were able to make changes to our setup with just 2 clicks.It was so hard for us to monitor everything and ironSource made it so easy for us. We don’t need to worry about anything. The support is awesome and our app revenue boosts were mindblowing. ironSource helped us boost our app revenue 100%.We have a plan for our games for the next year or two and we want to continue working with ironSource - it’s a crazy good platform and we want to try everything it has to offer because it really works.What advice would you give other indie developers trying to make it?If you want to develop games - give it a try - even if you start by just reading and learning online. Keep trying, because the more you try, the better.

In advertising, the word “premium” is often used to describe a better class of time and attention. But how do you define what a premium video ad placement actually is? While it can be subjective, there are three key factors that objectively contribute to quality user experiences in the mobile advertising space. We’ve created a handy guide to help marketers decide where to assign their ad spend.1. Format: 100% full screen vs 100% viewableWhat does a premium advertising format look like? Consider that film and television still account for some of the best opportunities of any advertising channel, representing almost 32% of total media ad spending in the US. Why is that? Because television and theatrical ads are full screen, meaning audiences engage with the content without distraction, unlike mobile web where host content and even other advertisements are competing for audience attention. Even as digital advertising continues to grow, cinema advertising continues to be a major source of mind share for top-tier brands, having closed out another record year in 2018 with more than $750 million in revenue.Over time, the world of mobile advertising format shave come to embrace the same things that continue to make television and cinema such powerful channels for marketers. When advertisers first entered the mobile space, however, they relied on ad formats that were already popular on desktop — banners and in-browser video primarily — which are typically couched in less engaging content that only serves to dilute audience attention. It was a far shot from the dedicated viewing experience of a theatre or television screen, but things have changed for the better.Today, modern mobile in-app ads have more in common with theatrical or television ads than their predecessors. They all occupy the entire screen to capture an audience’s attention in a way that few other channels can match. Our mobile devices are with us in our most private moments, affording advertisers a valuable opportunity to connect. Television, cinema, and in-app mobile ads provide a premium format for reaching audiences, more so than mobile web or even native social.2. Contextual relevanceA premium advertising experience is one that is relevant to the largest possible percentage of its audience. It’s why modern advertising innovation is so heavily geared towards the reduction of waste through better audience targeting. The less money advertisers spend on the time and attention of audiences unlikely to take action, the better. This means pursuing the ideal of 1:1 overlap between advertising content and audience interest. A lofty goal, but one in-app advertising solutions are coming closer to every day.Data is king here, and mobile applications are among the most data-rich environments around when users opt-in to share their information. Variables like age, gender, behavior, spending history, and more all empower mobile advertising platforms to deliver a more contextually relevant advertising experience, ensuring fewer wasted ad dollars.It’s this same wealth of data and pursuit of greater contextual relevance that has already helped make mobile gaming become one of the largest and most profitable markets on the planet. Advertising and in-app purchases are the only two ways for game and app publishers to make money, and modern ad technology has proven effective enough to make mobile game revenue the second most profitable modern entertainment medium, beaten out only by global overall gaming revenue. Other mobile game and app developers have long leveraged these abilities for their own growth goals, but these same opportunities are available to brands.3. Positive sentiment: Delight your audienceFew ads can perform as well as those users enjoy interacting with. Studies show that ads which offer in-app rewards consistently generate the highest sentiment of any mobile ad format, while mobile pop-ups typically rank last. A recent Tapjoy study found that 68% of respondents felt positively towards mobile rewarded ads that operate in this way, the highest of any format available. Mobile users are perfectly happy to watch ads frequently, provided their time is respected, and this means higher ad engagement for brands.Recent years have seen the rise of “value-exchange” or “rewarded” advertising. Mobile veterans recognize it as any integrated ad placement that prompts audiences to opt-in to view an ad in exchange for virtual compensation. Rewarded advertising has proliferated in the mobile gaming space, where ads can offer in-app currency and extra lives. It’s become the defacto solution for publishers, and as the practice becomes more popular, we’re seeing it expand into other app categories like dating and media.Mobile advertising is both an art and science, but there are differentiators that distinguish a premium experience from a simply passable one. Always consider how the following can fit with your campaign:- Is your ad both full screen and fully viewable?- Is your ad contextually relevant to its audience?- Does you add offer tangible value or rewards to viewers?If you’re an advertiser looking to make the most of your media budget and you answered “no” to any of these questions, the advertising experts are here to help. With more than 10 years of experience helping connect advertisers with their ideal mobile customers, we’re confident that we can deliver meaningful growth for any brand or product.

Rapid delivery apps, or apps that deliver groceries within 10-30 minutes of app order, are attracting millions of users as well as tons of big name investors. PitchBook estimates that investors have coughed up $14 billion into these services since the beginning of 2021, giving rapid delivery apps the capital to improve and optimize - and it makes perfect sense why they’re getting so much attention. Because of the pandemic, users have made it a habit to start ordering their groceries through apps, and receiving those groceries within 30 minutes of an app order is a pretty innovative concept.Rapid delivery apps are largely operating out of major cities across the UK, US, and Europe, with a few first movers leading the market in these areas - Getir, Flink, Gorillas, Gopuff, Weezy, Dija, Jiffy, Fancy and Snappy are all notable names. However, with competition rising (smartphone use of grocery delivery apps rose over 40% in 2020 according to eMarketer) and such a large amount of capital being poured into these services in only a year, it’s becoming challenging for rapid delivery grocery apps to attract and hang on to users. Ultimately, everyone is chasing market dominance, but only a few will get to be the app of choice.So, how can you crush the competition, reach more users for your rapid delivery app, and ensure they stick around? Here are three strategies to get you started.Reach users first and keep them longerMany users are already using rapid delivery apps, but the space is still fairly new - with most companies established just last year in 2020. There are millions of users who are unaware they can get Advil delivered in minutes without ever leaving the house, and it’s important to align your UA strategy to reach those users before the competition does first.Think about the potential for growth by reaching app users directly on devices while they’re setting up their new phones. With 95% of users downloading 40% of the apps that will be installed throughout the lifetime of the device (that’s a long time) during the first 48 hours after purchasing their new phone, device setup is a critical touchpoint to become the app of choice.For example, ironSource Aura uses contextual information to place your app in front of users who are likely to engage during a customized device set up experience.Especially in such a young industry, optimizing your marketing tactics towards attracting users that will be loyal to your app is vital to beating out the competition. But a solid UA strategy must accompany a solid product, which leads us to the next point.Choose the delivery model that optimizes convenienceUltimately, users order from rapid delivery apps because they want their items fast, and they are even willing to pay more for it. To attract and keep users, you should be doing everything you can to make your service the most convenient and efficient - and that starts with the delivery model you choose.With most users ordering from rapid delivery services for urgent essentials or last minute items, these companies are fitting into users’ lives for the in-between, spontaneous moments. As people continue to live hectic and demanding lives, it’s important to position your app as a convenience offering through an integrated model.Some rapid delivery apps claim a vertically integrated model - where they source and own their inventory. In these cases, the service handles the warehouse and delivery logistics. Other apps have taken it a step further by hiring couriers as full time employees, ensuring that there are always people on standby to deliver. At the end of the day, choosing one of these models and sticking to it will give you the upper hand in achieving the fastest speeds in the long run.Once the bones are good, you can start thinking about your value proposition that will set you apart.Differentiate your product offeringAs we mentioned, the number of rapid delivery apps has exploded in the past year, making it hard to stand out. To acquire users that will likely stick around, focus on building a product that offers something unique and valuable.Ultimately, you don’t have to be the fastest to get a leg up. You can differentiate your product according to service and type of items offered. For example, you can increase your delivery range, allowing you to reach users outside of major cities. You could also offer items from specific retailers, such as local or organic grocery stores. The Istanbul based app, Getir, not only boasts about its ability to deliver over 1,000 products, but also differentiates itself by delivering around the clock.It’s also important to consider differentiating your product by offering promotions. Since time is of the essence in the rapid delivery space, it’s important to take responsibility for underperformance - try offering some sort of compensation when an order is late. You could also entice users to sign up by offering a promo with the first order. You could use marketing channels, such as ironSource Aura which has a full screen offer placement, to show these promos.As an example, Getir increases its value by not charging a delivery fee for orders over £10. By showing users that you care about quality and their needs, you’ll retain more for the long-term - over 70% of users stick with a brand with friendly employees and quality customer service according to Nextiva.In this incredibly saturated market, differentiation is a must. There are infinite ways to make your product stand out, and it all comes down evolving and innovating in a unique way.Rapid delivery apps are among one of the most innovative and disruptive concepts that came out of the last couple of years - it’s rare for a new idea to affect the market as much as rapid delivery has. On top of that, investors across the world, including Ophelia Brown from Blossom Capital, are saying they have never seen anything like the amount of capital that has gone into rapid delivery all at once, allowing them to grow in an unprecedented way. So, it’s clear that rapid delivery apps are not going anywhere, and with all this funding and attention being poured into the industry, competition is only going to increase. It’s valuable to prepare yourself for that competition by finding new ways to attract users and keep them around. Looking at your business model, finding ways to differentiate your product, and analyzing your UA strategy are great places to start.

ironSource sat down with our mediation partner Ian Marsh, co-founder at NimbleBit, to learn how he and his team made it big as an indie game developer.NimbleBit started developing games back in 2008, when the iPhone was just born, and since then has amassed millions of downloads across its portfolio - many even still play their games from 10+ years ago. Keep reading for a transcript of the conversation and more of Ian's insights on how to build a game that lasts.How and why did you first get started in gaming?My twin brother David and I were big fans of video games growing up, and in high school I started to learn how to program really basic stuff like, HTML and flash. Meanwhile, my brother started making levels for one of our favorite games at the time, Counter Strike, and some of their mods.In 2008, David, with another friend of ours, started NimbleBit and their first game, which was a cart racing game on Steam - an ambitious first project that included multiplayer real-time physics.2008! So you were really early to the space. What was it like to develop games back then?At the time, I put out a game called Hanoi - a really simple puzzle game where you had to move different size disks across the screen on different sized pegs. It's a classic computer science thought experiment. I put it up on the App Store for free because I thought eventually my family members and friends might get iPhones and I could show them what I made.Hanoi ended up reaching #1 on the App Store’s free download charts and getting millions of downloads.That was the biggest thing I've ever made. It was the first software I even published myself, so I was kind of blown away. We then put up an extended version of the game for $0.99, which ended up generating more money than my day job. That’s when I quit and started publishing apps under my own name.Being so early, how did you deal with the increase in market competition over the years?To get a leg up, we decided to try something creative and start doing these “free weekends” where we would put our $0.99 or $2.00 games up for free for the weekend. They would get a ton of downloads and then we'd flip them back to paid. The word of mouth from all the free players would lead to more sales during the week. It was more money than the money we lost putting it free for the weekend.We already had a sense that the free thing could be a big deal when Apple started rolling out the free-to-play functionality in iOS. Once they officially did that, we designed our first fully free-to play-game, Pocket Frogs. That ended up being the very first Editor's Choice on iOS.What’s been the most exciting part of your gaming career so far?Releasing Tiny Tower was the game-changer. It was Editor's Choice, and the game just blew up. It was kind of a phenomenon in 2011 when it came out, and even the New York Times and Wall Street Journal covered the game. Then we got a call from Apple, and found out that it was going to be chosen as the iPhone game of the year for that year's roundup!We released a bunch of new games and a lot of them got Editor’s Choice again, but they never really reached the same level as Tiny Tower. In retrospect, we should have just doubled down on Tiny Tower and just rode that thing into the sunset. Though now we’re concentrating on adding some real big, exciting, new features to the game for our 10th anniversary update.Some of our games have already hit 10 year anniversaries. Like Pocket Frogs. I talked to some people in the industry and they just can't believe that we have decade-old games that still have sizable active audiences that are still profitable 10 years later. We've been really lucky to grow the community of players we had over the years. I've found huge player-run discords for most of our games and join them and become parts of them.What is your favorite part about developing games?My favorite part has always been the enjoyment that our games bring to others, and the potential to find such large audiences, especially on mobile and especially with free-to-play now. If you're going to spend your time making games, why would you make a game for thousands of people when you can make one for millions of people?It's also just really humbling. We get emails to our contact that say, “I've been playing this game since I was in middle school, and I’m a parent now, and it's got me through a lot of rough times” Or “my mother played Pocket Frogs through chemotherapy and it was the one thing that just kept her focused and relaxed.” We get some incredible stories and I know that they're far and few between in the real world, but they really help keep you motivated.What do you think is the most challenging part about developing games?I'd say the most challenging thing is really just keeping up to date with how the industry changes. It's gone through a lot of changes since I started 10 years ago, and advertising is becoming more important. Trying to navigate the market, especially when you don't have a lot of resources, you need to be really smart with who you partner with and really try to maximize the resources you have.It’s also been difficult to figure out how we can profitably grow our games. The challenge is getting each game to the level where it's profitable enough to still grow with advertising, but doesn't turn away all the players who've come to expect a certain type of game from us.You mentioned people are still playing your games 10 years later. What advice would you give to other indie developers trying to make a game that lasts?Developers starting at this point in time definitely have a lot more challenges than we did 10 years ago. One of the best things you could do is to try to make sure you grow a community. People will try your game, but if you don't listen to what they have to say, you won't know what needs improvement or how to change it. Connecting with the players of your game and trying to really listen to what they have to say is incredibly valuable and can help you improve it into something that can appeal to an even wider audience.

What are cohort reports?In today’s market, analytics is a prerequisite to turning a game into a profitable business. Analytics allow you to track how various changes you make, such as introducing a new ad unit, impact KPIs and overall game health; it’s a way to reduce uncertainty, make smart decisions, and optimize performance.To gain a holistic understanding of your game’s health and accurately measure and track two of the most important metrics, retention rates and LTV, cohort reports are key. A cohort is a group of users who performed an action on a specific day - for example the day on which a group of users installed your game. Cohort reports provide insight into the behavior of user cohorts, by analyzing retention and LTV metrics. Why cohort reports are keyCohort reports are a crucial tool for unearthing the real picture of your game’s performance. Because they are based on the install date of user groups, cohort reports can show the impact on user LTV and retention from changes in your UA or monetization strategy. Nothing is ever as good as it seems...Cohort reports allow you to go a layer deeper than the surface-level metrics offered by user activity and performance reports. For example, perhaps these two reports show a rise in ARPDAU and DAU in a specific time frame; on the surface, it would seem like your app is hitting your monetization and UA goals. However, if you use a cohort analysis of the same time frame, you might see a reduction in user retention and LTV, despite the positive uplift in ARPDAU and DAU.What could possibly explain this? Maybe you’ve added a new interstitial ad placement and invested a bigger budget into UA to acquire users more aggressively, but the quality of these users is poor, and the new ad placement is disruptive to the user experience. As a result, despite the rise in ARPDAU and DAU these changes triggered, retention rates are decreasing as well as user LTV - which does not reflect a healthy growth strategy....Or as bad as it seemsConversely, you might see a drop in ARPDAU and DAU in your user activity and performance reports, and as a result try to make a change to your strategy, for instance increasing the frequency of interstitial ad placements. However, it’s feasible that retention and LTV are steadily increasing for user cohorts during the same period, and therefore making a change is unnecessary and potentially detrimental.Ultimately, the ability to analyze cohort reports on a regular basis is key to optimizing how you monetize your content and increases the likelihood of creating a profitable game over the long-run. Let’s look into how to actually analyze cohort reports - and when you should do it.How to analyze cohort reportsUnderstanding what you’re looking atCohort reports tracks the retention rate and revenue generated by different groups of users. Each row on the far left column represents a different user group, and the row at the very top shows the number of days since each user group installed your game.For every cohort, day 0 has a 100% retention rate, and as the days progress this number drops. The shade visually signals the strength of the retention rate or revenue value, allowing you to easily see any anomalies. For example, the April 29 cohort has a much higher Day 3 retention rate than the other cohorts and can be easily identified due to its darker blue shade. This could be due to a change in monetization strategy, for instance adding a new rewarded video ad placement in the game that helps users progress during a difficult level.This example shows a 14 day period, but you can choose different timeframes. Looking at cohorts from a few months ago can be useful as a point of comparison with more recent cohorts, and can shed insight on the effectiveness of your current monetization strategy and game design. Aside from customizing the time period, depending on the mediation or analytics platform you’re using, you can also select specific geos and, if you have multiple games, specific titles from within your portfolio.The same goes for revenue. As you can see below, this game’s users drive more value the longer they’re playing the game. When to analyze cohort reportsOn a daily basisYou should aim to look at your cohort report every day. First check your high level metrics in your performance and user activity reports, and then go to the cohort report to see the impact of your monetization and UA strategy on retention and LTV. By checking daily, you can stay agile with your strategy and make speedy, informed decisions to maximize the value of your users.After changing your growth strategyIn addition to checking in every day, it’s important to analyze your cohort report soon after making a change to your growth strategy. On the monetization side, for example, perhaps you remove an ad network from your waterfall, or roll out a new ad unit in your game.User activity and performance reports will show relevant metrics like eCPM, fill rate, ad engagement rates and revenue, but the only way to understand the impact on retention and LTV is through your cohort report.This is also true for your UA strategy - if you increase your bid and scale your installs as a result, it’s vital to check the impact of this on retention and LTV. Even though boosting your UA budget might drive an increase in DAU, if it’s bringing poor quality users, in turn lowering retention rates and LTV, then it's paramount you identify this issue early on. Otherwise, you risk wasting your budget.After changing your appChanges to your app, such as a new version update, should also be closely monitored using cohort reports. Perhaps the update triggers a short-term drop in ARPDAU, but because you fixed certain bugs and improved the user experience, retention and LTV of users is increasing.Analyzing cohort reports will contextualize such changes and give you a holistic view of their impact on your game’s business performance.The most successful game developers today are the ones who constantly optimize their game design and growth strategies. Cohort reports are a means to this end: they help you contextualize your other KPIs, measure the impact of changes you make, and ensure you’re never blinded by potentially misleading surface layer metrics. With cohort reports, you can always keep a close eye on the most important metrics for long-term success: retention and LTV.

ironSource VP Sales, US Marketplace Mike Schoelch sat down with Digiday this month at their Gaming Advertising Forum to discuss diversity among mobile gamers and the perceptions (and misconceptions) amongst advertisers. The fifteen minute chat, along with the just-released infographic, serve as a preview of upcoming joint research between ironSource and Digiday into the behaviors and attitudes of the heterogenous, broad base of players that engage with mobile games regularly.Watch the talk here:And take a look at some of our key findings:

According to App Annie’s 2021 State of Mobile Report, mobile gaming grew 20% year over year in both users and total consumer spend. But is that jump reflected in mobile marketers’ media plans for 2021? ironSource surveyed 211 advertising industry professionals across agencies and programmatic partners to find out and gauge how much of their media strategies focus on mobile gaming.Advertisers are ready to spend more in-game in 2021- Our survey found that ad spend in mobile games is set to increase this year, with 49% of those who have previously run in-game campaigns, and 32% of those who haven’t, planning on expanding in-game budgets in 2021. Meanwhile, 48% of those who have historically run in-game campaigns plan to continue to do so at existing spend levels.- 73% of survey respondents currently buy in-app ads- 51% of survey respondents currently buy in-game ads; 49% of these plan on increasing their spend from 2020, 48% plan on keeping it flat- 35% of those who did not buy in-game in 2020 plan on starting to buy in 2021Buyers who do not purchase in-game underestimate the size of the marketDespite the increase in spend and adoption, many media professionals continue to hold onto biases regarding who plays games, what kind of games are popular, and what ad formats work best in mobile games. This is particularly true of those who have never run campaigns on in-game inventory - as most found it difficult to identify the scale of the global gaming audience, their demographic makeup, or the revenue generated by the mobile gaming market.Out of buyers who do not purchase in-app:- 58% underestimate the number of gamers worldwide, which Newzoo reported in 2020 as over 2.6 billion- 60% understate the average age of a gamer, which is 36- 86% assume that people playing most frequently earn salaries between $50K-$149K, when in actuality it $250K+- 75% underestimate the revenue generated by the gaming market. Mobile games made up $76 billion of revenue in 2020, according to Newzoo. As a comparison, global revenue for other entertainment channels like streaming remains lower than gaming - e.g., streaming audio ($26 billion), streaming video ($42 billion).Buyers of all kinds continue to hold misconceptions about the gaming audience today- 73% of buyers - regardless of whether or not they buy in-game ads - underestimate how much of the app audience would engage with rewarded video to unlock content. According to eMarketer, 74% of users would watch an ad in exchange for in-app rewards or currency, whereas most media buyers assumed the number was 65% - and those who do not buy in-game ads were likely to estimate it at 51%.- Across 15 questions about mobile audiences and gaming, the average score was 45% correct among the media professionals surveyed, even for those who had previously run campaigns on in-game inventory.- 83% of buyers know casual games are the most downloaded genre of mobile games. However, 67% incorrectly identify puzzles as the most popular sub-genre of casual games, versus the 15% who correctly identified it as arcade- 63% of buyers assumed casual games were the top genre for time spent, while only 15% correctly identified RPG, strategy and action gamesWhat does this mean for ad buyers - and developers?It’s reassuring to see an increased investment in gaming as more advertisers understand the reach and impact of the mobile gaming audience. The findings indicate that there remains an opportunity to educate media buyers about the power and potential of in-app and in-game advertising, and of the benefits of interactive formats such as rewarded video.

There are many advantages to incorporating ad networks into your media plan, which you can learn more about here. In addition to gaining a competitive edge over other apps in your category, running user acquisition campaigns on multiple mobile ad networks such as ironSource, is an excellent way to increase ROAS and scale.There are three steps to running a user acquisition campaign on a mobile ad network: getting your media plan together, setting up the campaign itself, and then optimizing the campaign. Read on to learn more about each step of the process.1. Getting your media plan togetherThe first step to working with an ad network is setting a media plan. That means preparing the research and creating an initial plan for your app’s marketing strategy. Before going into the nitty gritty, it’s important to take note of what your competitors have already done and accomplished in this space.With mobile ad networks arriving on scene more than a decade ago, it’s likely that some of your competitors may have already run UA campaigns on ad networks. You can find these competitors through sources like App Annie, Sensor Tower, the app stores, and other intelligence services. Be sure to talk to your ad network partner to analyze the geos they’re targeting, the media sources they’re running on, and the creatives they’re relying on.Once you’ve chosen the best media sources and ad networks for your app’s UA strategy and analyzed the competitors in your space, there are a few last preliminary actions to complete on your checklist. This includes setting a ROAS goal, which is the amount of ad spend you want to recoup (check out our blog post or webinar on how to calculate a ROAS goal for your app). From there, you can determine your base bid. Once your checklist is complete, the next step is to actually set up your campaign.2. Setting up your campaignBefore you can actually launch your campaign, you should get to know the mobile measurement platform you’ll be using, in which you’ll need to fill in everything regarding your app’s campaign and attribution window - the amount of hours or days that an ad can get credited for an install after a user sees it. If you’ve only run campaigns on social and search channels, attribution platforms may be new to you, since social and search are typically self-attributing. However, mobile ad networks need third-party platforms to credit publishers and networks for the installs they successfully drove.Make sure to activate view-through attribution, which, in contrast to click-through attribution, ensures you are measuring your UA campaign by counting how many users install your app from the store after viewing your ad. This way you can make sure you are crediting the right ad network for the install. It’s also vital to keep track of who to show your ad to, based on who hasn’t downloaded your app, with a dynamic suppression list to avoid wasted ad spend. Lastly, make sure your post-install events are making it back to your ad network, so that you can get a deeper analysis of your campaigns’ quality performance.To optimize your ad performance from the start, have a set number of creatives that you are confident in and prepared to launch. Ultimately, you want to begin advertising with your best performing ads and it’s important to decide which ones before the launch date. You can test the performance of these ads on platforms like Facebook, and use the winners on the ad network.Once all of this is turned and ready to go, you’re ready to successfully launch your campaign on the mobile ad network. The real optimization, however, will come after the first ad is shown.3. Optimizing the campaignAs soon as your campaign is launched, you’ll begin seeing how well your creatives are increasing your IPM (installs per thousand ad impressions) and whether your bids are optimized towards your ROAS goal. From there, you will be more equipped to make decisions.Let’s start by discussing bid optimization. To better optimize your bids, utilize automated optimizers, such as ironSource’s ROAS optimizer. You can easily feed these tools your ROAS goals, which calculate the perfect bid for all of your apps and then update the bids automatically in real-time. Not only does this save you time and manual effort, but the optimizers generally deliver better results than most humans can manage - since they update thousands of campaigns to high degree of granularity.In terms of creatives, each ad network has its own benchmarks and best practices to optimize your IPM, so it's vital to constantly A/B test and refresh your creatives. Use in-ad data such as funnel analysis, time to engage, time to complete, and more to understand where users are dropping off to iterate your creatives and improve performance. For more about optimizing creatives, check out this eBook.Ultimately, you want to put yourself in the best position to drive quality traffic from your ad network campaigns. If you’re considering starting to work with an ad network, follow these three steps to break down the process, and get in touch with us to learn more.

In the past year, we’ve seen a surge in the amount of game and app developers who have adopted in-app bidding into their monetization strategy. But like with any new technology, and especially one that automates manual operations, it’s important to retain as much control as possible and get full transparency into its performance. By relying on hard data, you’ll be better equipped to optimize and control the automated setup, make the right decisions for your business strategy, and manage the conversation with your ad network partners.Here are 4 KPIs you should be monitoring through your mediation platform to make sure your in-app bidding setup is performing at maximum efficiency.1. ARPDAUIn a traditional waterfall, developers have complete control to set price floors or CPMs for each network, and use eCPM to measure the impact on network performance. However, in an in-app bidding stack, the networks’ algorithms determine CPM in a real-time auction, and there’s less developers can do themselves to increase a specific network’s performance. Accordingly, eCPM is no longer a relevant or actionable KPI for measuring monetization performance. That’s why, ARPDAU, or average revenue per daily active user, has become the go-to metric for measuring in-app bidding performance.ARPDAU measures the revenue from in-app purchases, ads, or both on any given day, by summing the revenue on that day and dividing it by the number of unique active users. It provides a holistic view of overall app revenue, and can indicate the health of your monetization stack.2. Bid rateEach time an app calls to load an ad, the in-app bidding auction sends a bid request to each bidding network, and asks if they’d like to bid and how much. The bidding network can choose whether or not to provide a bid. Here, bid request represents the number of times a bidding network is asked to participate in the auction, and bid response represents the number of times a bidding network responds to the request with a valid bid.Putting this all together, the bid rate KPI is the percentage of times that a bidding network chooses to participate in the auction, and is measured by dividing bid responses by bid requests. Think of it as the equivalent metric to fill rate in the traditional waterfall.It’s important to keep in mind that bid rate can vary significantly between networks, due to differences in strategy, technology, and demand - meaning bid rate is not the best indicator of individual network performance. Rather, you can use bid rate to compare a network’s performance across your app portfolio and identify server tech issues in each. For example, if on average, you see the ironSource network has a 99% bid rate, but on one app you see it’s at 70%, that’s a signal something is wrong. Meanwhile, a 0% bid rate most likely indicates a setup issue.3. Win rateWin rate is the percentage of times a bidding network wins the in-app bidding auction and gets to load the ad, and is calculated by dividing bid wins by bid responses.Analyzing win rate can help you determine the strength of a bidding network, and pinpoint any opportunities to optimize your monetization setup. For example, a decline in a network’s win rate may be due to competition that’s improving performance, or a change in the network’s demand. Meanwhile, an increase in a network’s win rate may encourage you to use that network across other games in your portfolio, or other segments or countries in that game. Additionally, a drop in win rate across all bidding networks at the same time may signal setup issues - perhaps bids aren’t sorted by eCPM or rates are set incorrectly.Note, however, that networks that have lower bid rates and are more selective with the bid requests they choose to respond to, tend to have higher win rates. Ultimately, win rate as a KPI is most valuable when compared over time, and also when used alongside render rate, which we’ll dive into next.4. Render rateRender rate is the percentage of times a bidding network bids in the auction and then serves an impression. It’s measured by dividing bid response by number of served impressions.Comparing render rate against win rate can alert you if there are operational issues with your in-app bidding stack. For example, large discrepancies between win rate and render rate may suggest that the network is bidding on fewer engaged users, there’s a poorly placed traffic driver, or that you didn’t call to show the ad. Take note that when measuring these in-app bidding KPIs, it’s critical to analyze them according to network, geo, app or ad unit, rather than overall. Doing so will lessen the load, and make the numbers easier to decipher.Render rate is useful for more than just troubleshooting technical issues. This metric can be used to understand the level of competition within a network, by showing you how many impression opportunities manifested into a real impression. That’s because though the auction takes place on the impression level, not every opportunity for an impression manifests into an ad served.These 4 KPIs should be at top of mind when looking to optimize your monetization bidding stack. Be sure to leverage the transparency into reporting that your platform is offering you, in order to better control your business strategy and increase your app’s revenue.

As we continue to see automation become a part of almost every part of a user acquisition strategy, creatives are one of the few remaining pieces where a human touch matters. Devising an innovative creative strategy that makes an impact by attracting and engaging users is essential for an effective campaign.To give your creative strategy a boost, we spoke with Elad Gabison, Creative Lead and Game Designer at ironSource Playworks, about how to improve mobile game creatives and hook users into next year.1. Adopt a squad mentalityBalancing excellent ideas for game creatives with great execution can be a tricky balance. Waiting too long to go from ideation to execution could prevent your creatives from ever getting off the ground or hurt the success of the overall strategy as you rush the design. The ideal situation is to execute your good idea quickly while maintaining quality. And to do this, you should adopt a squad mentality.Rather than keeping teams separate and moving the creatives from one group to the next, a squad mentality means involving the performance, operations, and creative teams all together in the creative strategy. Or if you’re a lean operation and one person represents all 3, then the goal is to make sure the creative strategy is aligned across all parts of the business. When all parts of the game execute on creatives together, it improves the efficiency and quality of the creatives while ensuring the designs remain true to the idea of the game. In general, players aren’t likely to be game designers so comments from people outside your creative circle - like a developer from the performance team - can reveal important findings about the creatives. And, getting feedback from different people in your organization can help inspire new and unique creative ideas.2. Hyper-casualize your designsThink about how hyper-casual creatives are easy for users to understand, quick, and engaging - this attracts a much wider audience. Thinking like a hyper-casual creative designer when you go to optimize your own creative strategy can help you simplify your design or tap into player emotions to boost engagement and conversions.For example, we’ve seen success with testing a version of creatives that frustrate players, such as a playable or video showing a deeper level or boss level of the game. Hyper-casual games are defined by their simplicity and increasing difficulty as players progress - as they get deeper into the game, frustration is often a theme that emerges and encourages people to keep playing, since they want to win. Showing failure or frustration in your creatives inspires a feeling in the users that they can do better themselves and can encourage conversions.3. Use data to inspire your creativityCreative decisions backed by performance data are more likely to succeed, so be sure to check on the creatives from other apps that are shown in your game, the apps that you’re advertising on, and the KPIs of your competitors’ apps. Taking into account the data from all of these sources can help provide a more complete view of the performance of your creatives and affirm your findings.Before launching your creative set, look at data from apps that are performing well and incorporate lookalike visuals or mechanics to try to attract traffic. You already know that users enjoy playing this type of game because supply-side, demand-side, and/or competitor data proves it - so you can design your creatives to appeal to that game’s players.Analyze data after a creative launch, too, so you can use this information to balance quality of users and scale. If your KPI is retention, and you notice initial [tooltip term="installs-per-mille"]IPM[/tooltip] was high and then users dropped off, it could indicate that the quality of the users was low as they didn’t stay to keep playing your game - something could only know this by checking your creative’s performance after launching. To fix that, look at previous creatives that met your quality benchmarks and see what parts you could apply to your current creative set. For example, it can help to expand the number of levels in a creative, so users get a fuller game experience and feel more emotional buy-in.4. Hook users with mini-game playablesMini-games are trending across game genres because they increase engagement and encourage users to play for longer - making them effective as creatives, too.Even if you don’t have mini-games implemented, you can still use the concept to inspire your creative strategy. Try out playables that highlight different types of mini-games, mix up the mechanics, or highlight various characters, to see what meets your KPIs. Just make sure the mini-game relates to your game’s theme and mechanics - you want users to understand your game’s concept and still be excited to play once they go to the app store to download it. And depending on how well the creatives perform, results could indicate mini-games would be an engaging addition to your game. This is one of many trends, so keep your eye out for other ones to use and adapt in your creative strategy and always be testing to find the balance between quality and scale.Gearing up your creative strategyIf you’ve read until here, then we should tell you - don’t take these 4 mobile creative tips as the be-all-end-all. A great creative strategy is all about reinventing yourself, finding what’s relevant for your game, and rebuilding every tip we’ve given you here so it’s adapted for your game design. Try out one of our suggestions - or all of them - and see what sticks.

Mobile ad metricsThe rise of interactive ads has opened up a new world of in-ad data which gives insight into the user journey, from impression to click and everything in between. With the market as saturated as ever, an intricate attention to detail in order to optimize ad creatives can be the difference between a scalable IPM and a poor IPM; a successful game and a failure. Below, we take you through the key in-ad data metrics that you should be optimizing, and how, through various A/B tests, you can do exactly that.Engagement rate and time to engage (TTE)Getting the user to tap on the playable and begin playing is the first challenge for your creative. Engagement rate is the percentage of users who interacted with your ad, and represents the first stage of interaction with the creative. Time to engage is the number of seconds it takes for the user to interact with your ad, for instance tapping on it and starting the play with it.For hyper-casual games, the goal is to have a short TTE, as this will indicate that the creative is intuitive and immediately appealing. By contrast, a playable for a more complex game can have a longer TTE - after all, more complex games will likely require more information on the creative, and you want users to understand what is required from them.To improve engagement rates, focus on optimizing the tutorial at the start of the ad. When developing the tutorial, it's crucial not to overwhelm the user with information; avoid adding too many instructions on the screen, and focus on making the gameplay as intuitive as possible. The key is to hook the user in the first couple of seconds - that should guide your efforts.After the initial interaction, such as engaging with the tutorial, comes the core gameplay of the playable ad. Test combinations of level of difficulty, number of levels, and amount of obstacles within the core gameplay, A/B testing to try to understand what motivates your users. If for example engagement rates are low and a user isn’t interacting with the core gameplay, try adding a hint, such a gesture showing what’s needed to progress.Time to complete and completion rateAchieving high engagement rates is just one step in the funnel - you then need to focus on maximizing completion rates. Completion rate is the percentage of users who get to the end of the ad creative without exiting out or skipping. This indicates how engaging your creative is, although high engagement rates do not always translate to high completion rates.The key to ensure the latter is choosing the right gameplay to showcase. Doing this requires an understanding of what motivates your core audience, and leveraging this in the ad. For instance, in match-3 games, typically most users are primarily motivated by meta features, so it’s important to focus your A/B tests on the metagame and not the core gameplay. In a midcore role-playing game, where players are strongly motivated by characters and leveling up, consider focusing the ad creative on the different characters and highlighting their traits, A/B testing to determine which characters drive the highest engagement and completion rates.Click-to-store rateHigh engagement and completion rates on their own do not necessarily mean a successful playable ad campaign - success will be measured by the number of users who click on the ad’s CTA (call to action) to install the game in the app store. Click-to-store rate is the percentage of users who completed your ad creative and then clicked to go to the app store listing.Often, if the other parts of the puzzle are finely tuned, such as the tutorial and gameplay, then a high click-to-store rate will be a natural outcome. There are also ways to directly optimize the click-to-store rate, such as the CTA. This is the button that appears at the end of the ad, prompting users to download with a message like “Download now” or “Play for free”.The text in the button can be optimized by leveraging the motivations of the users playing your game. For example, Playworks optimized the CTA of a midcore game according to the desire of its core audience to unlock cool characters. Instead of the simple “Download now”, Playworks tested the CTA with “Level up” and “Upgrade your hero”. This helped the ad creative meet the midcore genre’s click-to-store rate benchmark.It’s also worth noting that conversions can also take place before the end card appears. Some developers test slightly more aggressive strategies in which the user is taken straight to the app store after a certain number of clicks on the ad.Data and creatives: Two peas in a podA good game doesn't necessarily translate to a good creative. That’s why rigorous A/B testing, paying close attention to the genre benchmarks, analyzing your ad performance, and optimizing based on your findings is key for any mobile games company, whatever the genre.Ad creative optimization is only becoming more crucial for mobile games, and in the largely automated world of performance marketing, it is one of the last levers UA teams can use to gain an advantage over competitors. By focusing on optimizing the metrics discussed above, you can ensure you’re making the most out of this opportunity to stand out from the crowd and run scalable, high impact campaigns.Learn more by checking out our other blogs, including ‘Mobile Gaming Industry Trends in 2021’ and ‘How to Improve User Experience and Conversions in Playable Ads’