Digital ads are a common way for marketers to promote a product or service to attract customers. This form of digital marketing has been multi-billion-dollar marketing strategy.
There are many apps been created every year and while there are usually two types of monetized apps available; free apps and premium apps, users have been more inclined towards free apps. To monetize their free apps, developers look to accept payment from advertisers to allow ads to be put in their free apps, and from this deal both will benefit while the users will still have a free app to use.
If you are developer or publisher looking to monetize your apps, here are three main things you should keep in mind.
Choosing Your Ad Network
An ad network is a platform of sorts that acts as a bridge between the publishers and the advertisers where publishers can offer prices and space in their apps for advertisers to put their ads in.
They are many ad networks out there, such as Google offering their own ad network through their Google AdMob. Choosing the right ad network depends on what kind of audience a publisher hopes to reach and where they are.
Choose Your Ad Format
In-app advertisement comes in many forms. There are five types of ad formats available.
Banner ads, or display advertisements, are essentially those text or image ads you would normally find at the top or bottom of an app, and sometimes on the sides as well. This is very much the most common ad format used.
Native ads are ads designed to be as least intrusive as possible to the viewer. They are ads that blends in with the content of the app, such in Instagram, where many ads are treated like a regular post on the social media platform and users would have mistaken them for a normal post if the post themselves did not have the word ‘ad’ in them.
Interstitial ads appears when a user moves between content within an app. These types of ads are usually displayed within the whole screen of the device used.
Videos ads are, of course, clips that displays what they advertisers are looking to promote. They can display in any other formats, such as in a banner ads, native ads or interstitial ads.
Offer walls ads are usually found in pages that are focused on promotions and discount offers. What offer wall ads does is they are essentially mini stores that display promotional offers such as discounts or require some sort of action from the users by offering rewards in the form of tokens such as watching a video.
Each ad format comes with their own advantage and disadvantage, and which one you choose is best suited depends on how you intend to create and design your ad.
Choose Ads That Are Unobtrusive
When are you considering the types of ads and their formats to put in your app, make sure to take user experience into consideration. If users find ads that are obtrusive, it will make their experience irritating and they might even stop using the app all together.
When monetizing your app, try to balance user experience while maximizing profit.
Choose Your Pricing Model
The pricing model is important as this will decide how the ads would generate money. Currently there are three pricing models for in-app advertisements.
Of course, publishers don’t have to limit themselves to only one. They can have multiple ads with different pricing models or can switch to a different model to find out which one works out the best.
Cost-per-mille, abbreviated as CPM, is a model where the advertisers pay the publishers of an app whenever their ads are shown a thousand times. It is convenient in that the ads only need to be shown in the apps without any further actions.
Cost-per-click (CPC) is when advertisers pay the publishers whenever their ads are being clicked on by the users. This type of model can be risky to publishers because if the ads are shown and displayed but do not receive any clicks from users than this model would not be generating any revenue.
But if they do have a large user base who are interested to click on the ads, then this pricing model can potentially earn more revenue than a CPM model.
Cost-per-action (CPA) is when advertisers pay the publishers only when a specific action is done through their ads such as watching a video or installing the app itself. This is probably the riskiest model for publishers to have as even if the ads are being shown or clicked if the users are not performing the specific actions than they will not be able to generate revenue from the ads.
Consider Not Just The Present But Also The Future
The technology and technique to advertise your app suggested are the valid even to this day. However, there are many predictions for the foreseeable future about the way marketers advertise and the technology they use will change.
As such it is important to keep in mind the future of digital advertising because when a new method or technology to online advertising comes out, you might want to adopt it early if you wish to keep up and maintain your app revenue.