Offerwall 101

Today, we’re walking through the offerwall basics: what an offerwall is, how it works, why it matters, and how it impacts monetization and user acquisition.

Hey everyone! I’m Eyal and I lead the offerwall channel at Unity and I’m here to walk you through everything offerwall. Today, we’re starting with the basics: what an offerwall is, how it works, why it matters, and how it impacts monetization and user acquisition. Let’s dive in.

What is an offerwall?

So what is an offerwall exactly? It’s an in-app marketplace that works like a mini-store, listing multiple offers users can complete in exchange for in-app rewards or bonuses.
These offers could be anything from downloading an app or a game and completing a certain event, level, or action – they look something like this *points to screen.* And it’s completely user-initiated – so they can always choose whether or not to engage with it. This list is continuously updated so that even the most dedicated users can consistently engage in new offers.

The fact you don’t have ads shouldn’t limit you from having an offerwall – don’t think of it as an ad unit, think of it as an economy driver.

Let’s zoom out for a second. The offerwall works because it’s a value exchange between three different stakeholders – users, app developers, and advertisers. Users get rewards that help them progress in a game or get rewards in an app. Developers who place the offerwall in their apps get to monetize engaged users, boosting ARPDAU and retention. And advertisers get to acquire extremely high-quality users at scale, and cost-effectively. In fact, thanks to the cost per engagement, or CPE, model, advertisers only pay for users who complete specific events (the ones they decide are valuable). We’ll dive more deeply into the developer and advertiser perspectives in later episodes.

Now, let’s explore what the user journey looks like by zooming in and putting ourselves in their shoes.

How does an offerwall work? From the user’s perspective

Let’s see how an Offerwall works, from the user perspective. Let’s say you’re playing your favorite RPG game and you see a pop-up ad saying you can “earn free currency.” Sounds nice – but what’s the catch? You click on the traffic driver and you’re presented with the offerwall. Here, you see a range of interesting offers, each offering a different value depending on the task.

Users will find these traffic drivers in different spots throughout the game, like the game’s menu or store. They can also appear to help the player in a time of need – for example, when they run low on hard currency but want to continue playing the game.

So, let’s say you decide to click on an offer for 100 gems, in exchange for downloading a game and reaching level 10. You reach an intermediate page that explains the offer – and now it’s time to initiate the offer.

From here, you’re directed to the app store, and you download the new game. As you’re playing this new game and working your way up to level 10, you can check your progress at any time – just return to the original game’s offerwall and check the progress bar.

Once you finally make it to level 10, congrats! You’ll find your 100 gems already waiting for you in the original game you were playing. And it’s a win-win – maybe now you’ve found another mobile game to add to your rotation.

Monetizing with offerwall

So, we’ve covered the offerwall basics – now let’s explore who uses it and why. We’ll start with how app developers utilize offerwalls to boost their overall monetization.

Offerwall has become an integral part of many in-app monetization strategies. Now, it might seem a little strange to send your users to another game. But let’s consider why you don’t have to worry about that. Even though users spend their time completing an event in another app or game, they’re only proving how committed they are to getting rewards in your game. You have very little to lose with offerwalls – and we even have data to prove this.

Offerwalls help developers increase revenue, retention, and even in-app purchases over time. Let’s explore exactly how.

Significantly increase revenue

First, developers who monetize with offerwall attract top advertisers – so using offerwalls can give you a major revenue boost. They deliver super high eCPMs – according to our data, eCPMs for Android in the US can reach up to $940. That’s how much advertisers are willing to pay for deep events, high engagement, and quality users. Not only that – special offerwall promotions capitalize on high traffic. Since they take place during holiday weekends all year long, the offerwall gives you regular ARPDAU spikes throughout the year. We’ll dive more into these promotions in an upcoming episode.

Improve the user experience

Next, engaging in an offerwall is completely user initiated, so having an offerwall won’t impact your user experience. Offerwalls don’t affect the app flow, and they can even improve it – after all, they give users access to premium rewards without spending a dollar.

Increase retention

Offerwall engagement is also directly correlated with strong user retention. That’s because offerwalls enable users to continue playing for longer periods of time – once they’re out of coins, they don’t need to quit – instead they can just complete an offer and use their new rewards to keep playing. By committing to a time-consuming activity, they’re even more motivated to enjoy the rewards – boosting retention even further. In fact, we’ve seen that retention among offerwall users is 5-7x higher than non-offerwall users – at day 7, 14, and 30.

Increase IAPs

Even though the offerwall attracts users who don’t want to commit to in-app purchases, it helps convert these non-payers to payers. In fact, offerwall users are 10-14x more likely to make an in-app purchase. Once offerwalls give users a taste of the exciting features they’re missing out on, many eventually decide that the perks are worth the money.

Essentially, offerwalls are a great mobile monetization strategy for any freemium app with an economy. Their potential extends beyond mid-core RPG and strategy games to even casual games like puzzle, arcade, lifestyle, and entertainment.

Scaling up user acquisition with offerwall

Now, let’s explore how advertisers make the most of offerwalls to ramp up their user acquisition campaigns.

Buy cost-effectively

With offerwalls, advertisers don’t pay for installs – they just pay when users perform certain meaningful events in the game, like reaching a specific level or performing a specific task in a game. Thanks to the offerwall cost per engagement and cost per action pricing models, advertisers can buy very cost-effectively at scale.

Acquire quality users

The offerwall also gives advertisers the ideal user – dedicated and engaged with strong retention. Compared to users from other channels, a user acquired through an offerwall is more likely to make high-value actions and play for longer.

Increase ROAS

Finally, users acquired through the offerwall offer major revenue opportunities – not only are they making in-app purchases, they’re also still engaging with your other ad opportunities and that generates higher than average ARPU and ROAS.

That’s it! We’ve gone over what the offerwall is, how it works, why it matters, and how it boosts monetization and user acquisition. Now, let’s move on by diving into monetizing with offerwalls – and what it takes to implement an offerwall monetization strategy. See you next episode!