Maximize Your In-App Ad Monetization for Q4 2022

It’s that time of the year again. Back-to-school, preparing for Q4. This is a huge opportunity for publishers to monetize their ad inventory. While back-to-school campaigns are in full swing, brand advertisers have also started planning future campaigns for the last half of the year, aiming to increase sales during events like Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. Holiday advertising presents a great opportunity for mobile publishers to monetize and take advantage of the increased demand queued up to flow through in-app ad exchanges.  

However, it’s important to prioritize the right mix of supply-side platforms (SSPs) and exchanges to maximize monetization and reap the benefits from the last few months of 2022. Here are a few variables to consider as we dive into the last stretch of the year:  

Diversify demand – We recommend that you talk to your bidding partners (SSP/Exchange) to understand the projected demand growth in Q4 2022. Your conversations must factor in the following:

• Growth in brand and UA spending: Advertisers' spend with InMobi Exchange grew by 34% between Q1 and Q2 2022. Also, our exchange grew by a 40% in Q2 2022 compared to the previous year. With both brand and UA spending bound to increase in H2 2022, we are expecting ad spending to clock new heights across regions coming up. It’s important that you speak to each bidder and know the trends they have observed and are likely to see in this quarter from the DSPs and/or advertisers they have on board.

• Agency Partnerships: Understand if unique demand partnerships and/or agency preferential status are part of their supply path optimization (SPO) efforts. At InMobi Exchange, we take pride in being an approved in-app partner of choice for the world’s largest agencies. For more details, please check out our SPO course on InMobi U. 

Support for high yield ad formats – Ensure that you get the best ROI on the ad formats you support.

• The second half of the year usually sees an increase in spending on high-performing, full-screen ad formats given their higher engagement and conversion rates. In general, full-screen inventory click-through rates (CTRs) are 13x greater than banner CTRs on average. Also, full-screen inventory ad requests for InMobi Exchange grew by 82% in Q2 2022 as compared to the previous year.  The ad revenue driven by this supply grew 1.5x for the same period.     

• Historically InMobi has seen, on average, video completion rates of around 80% and viewability over 90% (across Open Measurement SDK, IAS, Moat and DoubleVerify) via private marketplace deals.  
• Also, it is important to check if your bidding partner offers video pod support (i.e. providing publishers the ability to return multiple ads from a single ad request). In addition to our existing Video Pods, InMobi allows publishers to monetize from a mix of both Video and Static creatives in the same pod consecutively.  
• Having 2.6 billion mobile gamers globally and with an in-game advertising market expected to grow by almost 20% by 2024, it is imperative for gaming app developers to start collaborating with the right bidding partners. InMobi recently launched a partnership with in-game advertising provider Anzu, allowing publishers partnering with InMobi to monetize their titles with blended in-game ads that open up new reliable revenue streams, complement the gameplay, and work alongside other monetization models and solutions. 

Universal IDs – App developers are witnessing a 15% to 60%+ (averaging at 39%) uplift in eCPM for impressions where universal IDs (think LiveRamp, ID5, etc.) are being passed in the bid requests. Hence, we would suggest you prioritize bidding partners who offer ID management features such as InMobi’s UnifID which allows publishers to integrate with multiple ID providers of their own choice.  

Overall Yield – Q4, more than any other quarter, also requires close attention to yield. Having the right mix of SSPs and exchanges ensures efficiency by increased competition and improved returns between partners. We also have noticed that header bidding integrations help improve overall yield. InMobi recently partnered with Google Open Bidding which makes us the first in-app exchange to go live across all leading header bidding platforms.   

If a partner’s fill rate or win rate is low, then you should probably reconsider their rank within your monetization stack.    

For more detailed coverage, you can go through our InMobi U courses, which have been built to guide publishers on the best practices to improve in-app ad revenues.  

If you have any questions on the demand that we have queued or expect to see in the last quarter of 2022 and beyond, please write to your dedicated customer success manager.