Why You Should Use Rewarded Videos!

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Rewarded Videos are THE ad format to meet the needs of app developers and users equally. What makes them so unique and efficient from both points of view?

Let’s find out!

What Is Special About Rewarded Videos?

A rewarded video is a short video clip, on average 15 to 30 seconds long, which is designed for in-app environments and of non-skippable nature. It offers users a reward in return for watching the video, although the download itself is the user’s choice. Thereby, it represents a mixture of incent and non-incent advertising.

That’s not the only feature of rewarded videos: they also provide huge advantages for both the user and the advertiser! On the user’s side, interaction with this ad format is by choice since rewarded videos are fully opt-in. Users only have to watch videos if they want to receive rewards. Hence, this format doesn’t disrupt the user experience but increases user engagement with the advertisement. On the developer’s side, the previous point is very important: higher engagement rates also cause increasing revenue and higher viewability rates for advertisers. This interplay of both sides allows advertisers to monetize their app with advertisements and without disturbing the experience for the user.

That’s the theory behind the advantages of rewarded videos. Let’s see, if users actually interact with rewarded videos and don’t feel disturbed by them.

How are Users Reacting to Rewarded Videos?

Last year, the study “In-Game Advertising the Right Way: Monetize, Retain, Engage” disclosed how rewarded videos can help developers monetize their app and drive up user engagement. For that, over 2,000 mobile game developers and players were surveyed. In the following, we want to summarize the findings of this study.

  1. Players said, oftentimes they choose rewarded videos to pay for an item within the game like virtual currency, boosters or game lifes.
  2. Users prefer rewarded videos instead of fullscreen-pictures, banners and interstitial videos.
  3. Almost 80% of all players are willing to engage with rewarded videos in return for a reward: 18% said always, 44% said sometimes and 16% said rarely. Only 22% chose never as their answer.
  4. Just one of 10 app developers saw their retention drop: on average, it increased by 39% and decreased by 9%.
  5. With retention, the amount of revenue increased for many developers simultaneously. 52% of developers regard rewarded video ads as the biggest source of revenue in comparison to other advertising formats.
  6. For 86% of all developers, rewarded videos did not have any negative effect on in-app purchases. On average, 14% of users spent less, 16% spent more and the remaining 70% paid the same as before.

Best Practices for Rewarded Videos

Finally, we want to give you a few tips for using rewarded video ads to their full potential and to your full advantage.

Placement and Frequency

Place your ad where it is directly visible for the user! It should strike his/her attention so that he/she won’t oversee it. In addition, it is advisable to display a rewarded video from time to time but not too often. The keyword we’re looking for is “Frequency Capping”: the user should not assume that the ads will be displayed in every session or after every level. Instead, it should be something special for him/her if it shows up randomly in the game. By that, he/she will understand the value of the rewards he/she receives and be more willing to buy them later on. Thereby, rewarded videos are supposed to increase in-app purchases. However, the value of the video rewards shouldn’t exceed that of the in-app purchases. For that reason, ensuring that every user sees a limited amount of rewarded videos is also a part of frequency capping.

Value and Immediate Utility

The reward, which a user receives for watching the ad, should be helpful and beneficial for the game flow. This can be the respective virtual currency of the game, an additional life or useful power-ups. Additionally, the user should be able to utilize his reward immediately, e.g. to complete a nearly lost game level successfully. Like that, he could revive his avatar or get additional moves, in a game like Candy Crush. Thus, they also have the opportunity to reach a new personal high score through rewarded videos.

All in all, rewarded videos are a great format to engage users and to ensure they won’t leave your app if they are stuck at a specific point!

Pay Per Engagement

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There are many possible pricing models you can choose from to pay for mobile advertising campaigns. Since we already talked about CPI, in this article, we will address another common pricing model: Pay per Engagement.

What is Pay per Engagement?

Generally, there is no clear definition for this campaign type. Though traditionally, it is oftentimes viewed as a combination of two pricing models: CPA (Cost Per Action) and CPC (Cost Per Click). In this context, the term “engagement” signifies any interaction of the user with the displayed ad. At that, possible engagements range from closing the ad to stopping it from playing a video. Therefore, most advertisers define a specific action within the app as the engagement they want to pay for, for example clicking the ad.

The trigger for this campaign idea is the theory that the hardest advertising task is to gain the attention of a (potential) user or customer. Nowadays, cost per engagement is synonymously used with CPA: You set an action or engagement goal for the user upon which completion you have to pay the publisher.

How to Calculate Your Pay per Engagement

To calculate how much you have to pay for users to fulfill a specific action in your app, use this formula:

Calculation of cost per engagement

In detail, your total advertising spend is the amount of money you spent on ads that are supposed to trigger certain engagements. Then, you have to divide this value by the total number of engagements and interactions with specific content you measure at the end of your campaign. These interactions can vary from clicking on or expanding an ad or liking and sharing content.

The Best Ad Format for Engagement Campaigns

Advertisers who want to acquire high quality users should combine engagement campaigns with offerwalls. An offerwall is a display of various app advertisements that give users rewards in return for a specific action. For many developers, this action is simply downloading the app – although that often leads to low-quality users.

However, engagement campaigns encourage users to try the offered app by only rewarding those, who e.g. reach level 2 in the game. Like that, it is easier for users to find an app they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise in the app stores. Besides, engagement campaigns are very cost effective: you only pay for the users who actually fulfill the demanded action. Imagine: you create an offerwall campaign on a CPE basis and set the action on reaching level 5 of your game. Admittedly, you will see lots of users who install the app since it offers a reward – but you don’t have to pay for all of them! Only for those who actually interact with your app long enough to reach level 5.

For this reason, an offerwall and pay per engagement complement each other perfectly: the offerwall brings many users to the app but is lacking in quality, while CPE provides less but high-quality users.

Pay per Engagement Campaigns at ayeT-Studios

App based engagement campaigns are a special ad format offer by ayeT-Studios. Different to CPI, advertisers don’t pay for the install but for the actual engagement time of the user. Therefore, the users get a reward when they engage continuously with your app, which increases engagement significantly. We call this Rewarded Engagement Time.

Your advantages: You don’t need any third-party tracking due to our own tracking technology. Additionally, the maximum bid you set determines how long a user will be rewarded for engaging with the app. Furthermore, we will refund any remaining budget to your campaign, if a user doesn’t deplete it within 30 days.

 

What is Pay Per Install?

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There are many possible pricing models you can choose to pay for mobile advertising campaigns. In this article, we will explain a very common pricing model: pay per install, also known as CPI.

The pay per install model is a common pricing model for mobile marketing and advertising campaigns. It is also well-known under the term cost per install and the abbreviation CPI.

Cost-per-install is one of the many metrics, by which people measure their advertising budget. The advertiser only pays the ad network once the app is installed instead of just the advert being viewed (known as the CPM, or cost-per-mille, model). The difficulty is that ad networks have to address the right audience and place the ad in environments where conversion rates are high.

Generally, CPI campaigns belong to the world of mobile marketing as they are unique for mobile apps. In detail, app developers or specifically advertisers can place ads across various types of media to popularize their app. The goal is to convince consumers of installing the application they are advertising. At this, the advertiser only has to pay a set rate when a user actually installs the app.

How can I Calculate the Costs for a Campaign?

The general formula for calculating your pay per install is quite easy to apply. You divide your overall ad spend by the number of times your app was installed because of that campaign.

Cost per install - User Acquisition

Since an install of the app is more valuable than a simple impression, the costs are consequently higher. Sometimes about $3, although that depends on the platform (iOS/Android), the kind of app and the type of advert (e.g. interstitials, banners etc.).

Which CPI Campaign Types are Available?

Install campaigns can be realised through the bid type CPI and we generally distinguish between incent and non-incent campaigns.

Incent Install Campaigns

With the incent version, users get a reward for the download of an app and the advertiser only pays for the completed install.

Incent install campaigns are preferably realised through offerwalls. An offerwall is a mobile ad format which displays different apps and offers users a reward in return for downloading the app.

Non-Incent Install Campaigns

Here, you create a banner ad, for example from the creatives of the app, and place it within other apps for users to see. At that, the user won’t get a reward for installing the app – they rather decide to try it out of curiosity.

Although this campaign type leads to less installs, they are of high-quality since the user interacts more frequently with the app. However, non-incent campaigns are often more expensive than incent campaigns and you have to plan a bigger budget.

CPI Campaigns at ayeT-Studios

Besides these standard CPI campaigns, we also offer special campaign types for our customers.

High Retention Install Campaigns

When you buy app downloads the user has to keep your app for at least three days before getting a reward. Thereby, your retention rate and consequently your Apple App Store or Google Play Store ranking improves significantly.

Managed Install Campaigns

With our managed campaigns, you get country targeted installs with high volumes within three days. This service includes our media buying experts, who tend to every aspect of your campaign and leverage various traffic sources that match your individual requirements. Additionally, we will optimize your campaign constantly to improve your ad spending.

If you are looking for a burst campaign to place your app at the top of Google’s or Apple’s Store charts, this is the right campaign type for you.

Mobile Lead Generation

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As the importance of mobile devices is growing and growing, the necessity for completely optimized landing pages and creatives is undeniable.

In the following, you will learn about what kind of campaign types you can use to generate leads and the details of taking care of the campaigns.

What is special about the creatives to generate mobile leads:

When thinking about generating mobile leads, you are trying to interact with the users on their personal devices. Here are some tipps on how the creatives should look and behave.

1. Everything on the page should be interactive

As users navigate on mobile devices with their fingers, the content on your page should be interactive. If you have graphical assets on your page, they should all lead the user to a specific destination. Even the background of a picture could lead to a landing page.

2. Do not hide content behind hover events or triggers

Make yourself clear: users do not have a mouse, which makes it different for them to navigate. Mobile device users do not have the option to “hover” over content and engage with it. Mobile users can merely “tap” (the equivalent to a mouse click). As a consequence, do not hide content behind any hovering creatives when designing them for mobile devices.

3. Reduce the amount of form fields for mobile devices

If you plan to generate newsletter subscriptions or to get on any other personal user data, keep in mind how the user fills in the mandatory fields. As it takes a bit longer to fill out forms on mobile devices, you should reduce them to a minimum. You could for example combine the “first name” and the “last name” field to a “full name” field, or leave some fields out like date of birth or company name.

4. Use alternate calls to action

You have to rethink the way your calls to action are set up. An obvious lead for a smartphone could be the initiation of a phone call. However, try to bring a variety of CTAs in your content, like a link to a social media platform. As the screen of mobile devices is smaller than the screen of desktop computers, users have to scroll much more to view it completely. So you have to show the CTA more frequently to generate the same amount of leads.

5. The order of content is more important on mobile devices

On the screen of mobile devices, content can only be viewed vertically. This means you really have to bring it in a very easy-to-understand order.
We suggest the following order:

  • Introduce yourself – Company slogan/logo at the beginning
  • What is the purpose of the content?
  • Why should the user do what you are suggesting?

Conclusion

There are so many things to have in mind when designing a creative for mobile devices. All the suggestions we gave you before are just the tip of the iceberg, and the mobile world is changing constantly with increasing speed. You have to be brave enough to test new ideas, adapt and evolve alongside your mobile customers.

Which campaign types and cost models can you choose from?

Since you now know how a creative for mobile lead generation should appear, we want to introduce to you the campaign and bid types an advertiser can choose from. In general, lead means to achieve three things: a subscription for a newsletter, an account creation and/or a purchases.

Subscription Campaign

Subscription campaigns on mobile devices can be rewarded or non-incentivized. The advertiser can choose from many different possibilities for approaching the user. This could be a banner, an interstitial, a piece of rich media content or many others. In most cases the bid type for subscription campaigns is CPL (Cost per Lead), so the advertiser only pays the publisher if a predefined lead is completed. This reduces the risks for the advertiser as he only pays when a marketing goal is completed, and raises the risks of the publisher because he might have to display the advertisement several times until a user is converted and he gets paid. This results in a higher price than campaigns using cost models like Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per View. You can leverage the traffic of a CPL campaign when incentivizing it. This could be the set-up of an account, an extra life in game, or something else a (potential) customer could benefit from. You can expect to generate more leads when incentivizing the user, but other relevant KPIs like retention rate or Customer Lifetime Value won’t be as high as the KPIs of leads generated by non-incent leads.

Purchase Campaign

The ultimate goal for most companies is to generate purchases. Purchase campaigns and subscription campaigns are very much alike in their appearance. The bid type for this campaign is CPP/CPS (Cost Per Purchase/Cost Per Sale). The advertiser only pays the publisher, if a customer completes a purchase. This campaign type makes it very easy for the advertiser to calculate the revenue. It also tends to be quite expensive because the publisher/marketer has to target very precisely the right audience or display the ad often enough to generate purchases. To make this worth their while, advertisers have to invest a bit more, but they can also incentivize the campaign to drive even more awareness for a specific product or deliver on sales targets. A combination of a subscription campaign and a purchase campaign could be realized, if the advertiser gives a (future) customer a discount for a purchase if he/she subscribes to the newsletter.

With the help of ayeT-Studios, you can be sure to reach the right audience and get many newsletter subscriptions, account set-ups or even purchases. In our dashboard you can choose from incent and non-incent campaigns. Try it for free now!

Mobile Brand Marketing

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Every company, which uses a brand marketing strategy, wants its product to be famous and well known. Statista predicts that more than 2,3 billion smartphone users will be on this planet in the year 2017. This fact makes the mobile sector an essential keystone of the most brand marketing campaigns. In this article, we want to give you a general overview of the assets and possibilities you have to leverage your brand recognition.

Display Advertising

The most common way to use mobile marketing as a tool to increase brand awareness is the so called non-incent advertisement. These types of ads have a long history and their roots reach back to classical non-digital marketing. We will now give you information about the most common non-incent advertising assets.

Banner

A banner ad is a rectangular graphic ad, either text or image based. It is placed on the side edges of a mobile interface and stays on screen while the user interacts with the app.

Ad servers deliver those banner ads to a certain application or website. If a banner ad is displayed, the user can click on it and is then taken to the App Store or a corresponding landing page.

Interstitial Ads

According to the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), advertisers can place interstitial ads before, in between or after the primary content experience. In any case, there should be a natural break, for example when the user is navigating between content. On the contrary, ads that overlay or cover the content a user is looking at interrupt the user experience and aren’t considered interstitial but pop-up ads.

Video Ads

Since all forms of moving images or active content are really popular these days, video ads are a great format choice for mobile ads. They embody an opportunity to effectively reach a high percentage of mobile users.

The IAB generally distinguishes between three different forms of video advertisements:

  1. In-Stream: The video ad appears pre-, mid- or post-roll within the environment of a video content the user chose to watch, e.g. a video on YouTube.
  2. Out-Stream: The video ad appears within other content that either includes text or images.
  3. Other Non-Video Environment: The video ad appears in other content environments like in-feed or between content lists. Additionally, the advertiser can place his/her video ad within another display advertisement.

Native Ads

A native advertisement matches its environment in an application or on a website visually and behaves consistently with the native user experience. Like this, the advertisement should feel just like natural content to the user and it should avoid distracting the content experience.
Well-known examples for platforms, which use this type of advertising are social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.
Furthermore, they can appear in many different ways:

  • Content Recommendation
  • Search Ads
  • In-Feed Ads
  • Promoted Listings
  • In-Ad With Native Elements
  • Custom Ads

The main goal of native ads is to address the target audience to an enjoyable extent without being obtrusive.

Rich Media Ads

The idea of rich media ads is to encourage users to interact and engage more with the ad by combining different features like video and audio. Additionally, users can activate certain effects where an ad expands, floats etc.

Social Media

Social Media is very suitable to increase the popularity and the awareness of a brand. A good brand promotion strategy is a good start – but another part of the effort can be shouldered by influencers and marketers who make sure the audience gets to know your brand.

Social media brand promotion combines the basics of marketing with the far reaching access offered by social media.

Advertisers have to decide which platform would reach out to their target audience in the most effective way.

With Linkedin and Tumblr as exceptions, most other social media platforms are used with smartphones and tablets.

How do people use social media platforms © Statista

 We will now give a comprehensive overview of the biggest platforms and how to increase your brand’s awareness.

Facebook

Facebook is by far the largest and farthest-reaching social media platform.

There are 2 main promotion strategies:

  • Advertisers can choose to use a Facebook feature to their advantage by creating a page. However, this may pose the risk of not having the reach nor the impact a client wants for their product.
  • Sponsored or paid advertisements on Facebook allow the site to advertise to users directly: This strategy provides a more forward and personal approach, as most marketing efforts are tailored to a user by assessing his/her interests.

Twitter

Twitter has a penchant for allowing products and content to go viral almost overnight.

For promoters this platform opens a large range of possibilities. Twitter not only offers a wider audience which is simpler to access, but also offers the added benefit of interpersonal communication with the consumers.

Many consumers use Twitter to directly address large franchises and companies with their queries and complaints, and often get quick, individual replies. This makes the Twitter audience one that could allow most efficacy when running social media brand promotion.

Instagram

Instagram is the largest visually-oriented social media network. Of the 500 million monthly active users, many have made successful careers out of posting pictures and featuring products as a form of paid promotion.

For the promotion of a brand on Instagram, some advertisers may hire users with significant followers and reach, and have them get the message across. Instagram has proven to be remarkably effective and popular for social media brand promotion.

Own App

Another step is creating your own app for mobile devices to advertise your brand. This is most suitable for brands and companies, which are also working the field of ecommerce. In the last years, the revenue from mobile sales has risen by over 600%.

 

The Growth of Mobile Commerce © ayeT-Studios

With existing ecommerce companies (i.e. Amazon or eBay), the chance a user will look for another shop to make a purchase is much smaller. Also, the owner of the app can use push notifications to inform his/her users about new products, sales or other special events.

 

ayeT-Studios offers an all-in-one service for brands. We use the most advanced techniques and present advertisers a very efficient self-service platform, which can leverage their brand’s awareness.