Monitoring your in-app ad experience

So far in our series, we’ve reviewed what the ad experience is and how to measure and improve it. Today we’ll dive deeper into the second piece: how to help improve performance.

Welcome back! So far in our series, we’ve reviewed what the ad experience is and how to measure and improve it. We also discussed how important it is to balance maximizing your users’ experience and boosting performance. Today we’ll dive deeper into the second piece: how to help improve performance. Let’s go.

Measuring performance metrics

As an app developer, your most important performance KPI, of course, is revenue. But your revenue is only as high as the amount of users who engage with your ads. That’s why it’s critical to reduce churn.

To best measure your performance, the main KPIs you should focus on are revenue, churn rate, and churn yield. Churn rate is the percentage of users who stop engaging with an app over time – and churn yield is revenue per churned user. Essentially, you want to increase revenue while reducing your churn rate.

Tracking user trends

Let’s say you notice that ads from a specific advertiser are contributing to a high churn rate. You can take a closer look and examine exactly what UX issue might be causing it.

Then, you can reach out to ad networks directly to address other trends you’ve found. For example, if you set a rule that the X button must pop up in all ads after 5 seconds, but one ad only shows an X button after 10 seconds, you can reach out to the ad network for support.

Balancing revenue and churn

We’ve covered how to identify performance issues, address those issues, and boost your KPIs as a result. Now, we’ll cover how to boost your KPIs proactively. Let’s break down how to balance revenue and churn, and set your ad strategy up for success from the get go.

Modifying your block list

Once you’ve monitored performance, you can decide when it’s necessary to take action and optimize your ad experience. One of the quickest ways to do so is by modifying your block list. It’s pretty intuitive: if you have an app, and you see that ads from a specific advertiser are using inappropriate content, then they’re likely worth blocking. From here, you can use Ad Quality to analyze how blocking these ads impacted your revenue and churn.

But blocking isn’t always the solution. In fact, there can be major benefits to un-blocking certain ads or ad networks. Here’s a common example. Many developers choose to block ads from competing advertisers – after all, they don’t want their users to leave their app for a competitors’ app. It’s an attempt to minimize churn, but these developers don’t really know how competitor ads will affect the rest of their KPIs.

That’s why we recommend that you try unblocking your competitors’ ad content and assessing how it impacts your overall revenue and churn. To be safe, we recommend that you unblock one advertiser from your block list at a time, and monitor your KPIs as you go.

If showing your competitor’s ads generates a significant amount of revenue, this might outweigh the loss of the users leaving. And that’s exactly what many developers find. Like we mentioned, the more visibility you can get into your ad experience, the more informed decisions you can make – and ultimately the more revenue you can gain.

This episode, we’ve focused on performance, and how to balance your app’s revenue and churn. We covered how to monitor your in-app ad performance so you can boost that performance. In the next episode, we’ll dive deeper into the user experience, and explore how to use Ad Quality to handle user complaints. Stay tuned!