Optimizing offerwall UA performance

So far we’ve covered offerwall basics, implementing and optimizing a monetization strategy, and building a UA strategy. We’ll finish this series by covering the last piece in the puzzle: optimizing your offerwall UA strategy.

Hey everyone! We’re back for our next class in our offerwall course. So far we’ve covered offerwall basics, implementing and optimizing a monetization strategy, and building a UA strategy. We’ll finish this series by covering the last piece in the puzzle: optimizing your offerwall UA strategy. Let’s get started.

Measuring your success

The first step to optimization is defining your KPIs. KPIs for user acquisition can be split into two categories: performance and quality.

To optimize your performance, you need to look at conversions – or completions – per each event within your offer. To do so, you should analyze the whole offerwall user flow – from (1) impressions, (2) to first click, (3) to second click, (4) to install, and (5) conversion. The first click is the user clicking on the offer, and the second click is the user clicking on the instruction page, which takes them to the store.

After all, if you want users to reach the end of the flow, you need to analyze every step along the way to find every optimization opportunity. For example, if you see that your engagement is dropping before the users have a chance to reach the first event, you should determine what turned those users away and address the problem. We’ll dive into this example later.

To measure user quality, focus on ROAS. Generally, this means Day 7 ROAS, but some advertisers – like those advertising hyper-causal games – need a shorter one, like Day 1 or Day 3.

Retention is also a key quality metric – that’s why we recommend adding deeper events to the end of your offer to encourage deeper engagement.

Ultimately, your KPI goals are yours to decide – and if you have a partner, it’s their job to help you optimize toward those goals.

Optimizing your offerwall setup

To maximize scale, you need to increase the number of users seeing your offers on the offerwall. By increasing eCPM, your offers will be placed higher on the offerwall menu. But how do we do that?

The two biggest factors in an offer’s position in the offerwall are the bid and the completion rate. So if you want to stay competitive without just increasing bids, you should improve your completion rate.

Let’s say you’re analyzing your completion rates per event over the last month, and you notice one of your events has dropped 50% (show image). It’s time to investigate and optimize – either by changing your offer structure or modifying bids.

Offer structure

The better you structure the journey for your users, the more likely they’re able to complete your offer – so structuring your offer is an essential part of optimization. Let’s continue with the example that I mentioned, where completions for your first event are pretty low (show image). To improve your offer structure and maximize engagement, you should either add more events or increase bids.

In this case, users aren’t engaged enough right off the bat, so it’s worth adding another event earlier in the offer to make the reward more accessible. Try adding an event that users can reach within a few hours of playing (depending on each game’s unique timing, of course). This might mean reaching level 2 for some games and level 10 for others.

As you’re adjusting your offer structure, you should also refer back to benchmarks to see how your engagement compares to the industry average. This might also help you discover other opportunities for optimization. For example, let’s say you see completion rate for your last event in your MR-CPE offer is relatively high. This means you could try maximizing this engagement and include even deeper events.

Another way to increase completions is by expanding your UA activity to more geos. Let’s say you initially launched your offer in the US – once you’ve optimized it and your performance is stable, you can expand to other tier 1 countries, and eventually tier 2 countries and so on. We usually use a higher bid for the top-tier countries.

Bid strategy

Another way to boost your completions is by optimizing your bids. Your bids should be intentionally distributed throughout events – ideally based on CTCT, or the average time it takes to complete each event.

There are two ways to optimize bids: by event and by offer. Let’s start with optimizing by event.

After optimizing your offer structure, take a look at how your bids are distributed throughout your MR-CPE offer events. If you see a low completion rate for a specific event, there are two approaches you can take.

First, increasing your bids the classic way: which means increasing rewards. This way, when users see higher rewards for this event, they are much more likely to engage with it.
You can also redistribute your bids across your offer. The standard approach is increasing bids for events with a low completion rate and lowering bids for events with a high completion rate accordingly.

Now let’s move on to optimizing your bids by offer – specifically, redistributing them by offer quality. The best metric to measure quality results is ROAS. If your ROAS is higher than your original ROAS goal, it’s a good indication that you can increase your bids to be more competitive and scale your offers.

Of course, each app comes with its own batch of users – some are higher quality than others. That’s why it’s best to adjust bids per app or group of apps with a similar ROAS. Using granular bidding, you can increase bids for apps with high quality users and decrease them for apps with lower quality users.

Scaling up with special promotions

Finally, let’s set up a key piece of your user acquisition strategy: special promotions.

Special offerwall promotions take place during holidays and holiday weekends throughout the year. They’re designed to help publishers and advertisers double down on increases in traffic – boosting revenue and completions. Once publishers set their promotion dates, your account manager can give you the list of these publishers, and you get to decide when to participate.

Participating in special promotions is simple – all you need to do is increase bids during these time periods, making your offers more competitive and boosting your reach and completions.

During busy seasons, there’s already slight boosts in installs and completions – by participating in special promotions, your metrics can grow even further. According to our research, advertisers who didn’t raise bids during holiday seasons saw a 7% uplift in completions – but those who did saw completions jump 56%.

During special promotions, even Day 7 ARPU increases across supply sources – from 30% for non-games to 135% in RPG games. It’s a little risk and very high reward.

And that’s all! We’ve explored everything offerwall has to offer – from the basics, to growing monetization and UA offers. You now have the tools to build an offerwall campaign and scale it up – so you can boost your revenue, engagement, completions, and more.

Thanks for joining us in this course. If you missed any of the episodes or want to brush up on what we’ve learned, you can go back whenever you want and access the other courses. And if you want to know even more about setting up an offerwall strategy, just contact us and our experts will help you get started.