Maximize Your In-App Ad Monetization in 2021

It’s time to partner with the right bidding platform.

With the pandemic restrictions being eased across the globe and businesses gradually re-opening, advertisers and their demand-side platforms (DSPs) have started planning ad campaigns to improve their brand awareness among the back-to-school consumers and office shoppers, to boost their overall annual sales. This is a huge opportunity for publishers to monetize their ad inventory.   

For example, while back-to-school campaigns are in full swing, brand advertisers have also started planning future campaigns for the second half of the year, aiming to increase sales during events like Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. Similarly, performance or user acquisition (UA) advertisers will continue to leverage the (pandemic driven) increased in-app user base to execute their campaigns. The bottom line is, 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 working with your ad stack as bidders to maximize monetization. And it’s important to do this in early Q3 to reap the benefits from the last few months of 2021. Here are a few variables to consider as we dive into the second half of the year: 

1) Demand Diversity – We recommend that you talk to your bidding partners (SSP/Exchange) to understand the projected demand growth in Q3-Q4 2021. Your conversations must factor in the following: 

• Growth in brand and UA spending: Advertisers' spend with InMobi Exchange grew by 32% between Q1 and Q2 2021. Also, our exchange grew by a whopping 195% in Q2 2021 compared to the previous year. With both brand and UA spending bound to increase in H2 2021, we are expecting ad spending to clock new heights across regions coming up. It’s important that you speak to each bidder and know what kind of growth 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.

2) Support for Lucrative 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 37% in Q2 2021 as compared to the previous year.  The ad revenue driven by this supply grew 3.5x 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 publishers to start collaborating with the right bidding partners. 

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

4) 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. 

Weighing Bidders and Your Likely Course of Action       

We would encourage you to have monetization conversations with every exchange and SSP you work with, especially in August. Once you have a better picture of the demand and the yield potential, be prepared to shuffle the order in which you rank or activate bidders in your waterfall or header bidding setup.   

If you have any questions on the demand that we have queued or expect to see in the second half of 2021, please write to your dedicated customer success manager and we would be happy to walk you through our readiness to tap into the upcoming growth wave.