How to increase app advertising revenue by 30%: Mamba dating app case study

October 28, 2019

An experiment with the Mobile Mediation platform from Yandex allowed the owners of the Mamba dating app to increase revenue from monetizers in different ad blocks by 30% on average.

Mamba is a popular dating app with an audience of more than 40 million users from more than 50 different countries. The app is free and generates revenue from ad placement.

Experiment details

The app developers ran a two-week test to compare the classic waterfall model of mobile ad mediation with Mobile Mediation from Yandex with automatic threshold selection.

The key goal of the experiment was to compare how effective these models were for selecting the best monetizers and ultimately increase revenue from ad blocks in the mobile app. The experiment was run on native banners in the app. Half of the requests to demand platforms were based on the waterfall model, and the other half used automatic threshold selection. Monetization from the Yandex Advertising Network and AdMob was integrated into the app via Mobile Mediation. In order to also serve ads from other demand platforms, the IDs of blocks in those platforms were added in the Mobile Mediation interface. Then the latest version of Yandex Mobile Ads was integrated into the app and mediation was launched. The experiment lasted about two weeks.

Results

The results showed that in all cases, regardless of where the ad block was shown in the app, the revenue from impressions with Mobile Mediation was higher than the revenue from the classic waterfall approach. Advertising revenue for all ad blocks with Mobile Mediation increased by 30% on average, with an average fill rate of 75%. The ad block in the photo carousel showed the largest increase in revenue — 55%.

How Mobile Mediation works

Automatic threshold selection helps maximize revenue from in-app ads. It uses machine learning to predict which demand platform will win the auction and sends the request to them first. The algorithm is able to predict which platform will offer the highest bid for an impression to a particular user by analyzing the history of rendering statistics, the device type, the user's behavior and location, and hundreds of other factors. As a result, fewer requests are sent out to demand platforms and the ad can be served faster.

You can configure serving ads from the following demand platforms: Yandex Advertising Network, AdMob, MoPub, MyTarget, Facebook, StartApp, Unity Ads.

The ad host gets the maximum possible revenue, and the advertiser gets higher quality traffic and a relevant audience. It took about two weeks of training for the algorithm to reach peak efficiency in the Mamba app.

Kirill Graudin, head of the Mamba advertising department, shared their experience: "Both the Mamba website and mobile app are free for users. This means that effective advertising monetization is top priority for us. We are continually trying out new ways to improve advertising performance, including mobile mediation algorithms. In addition to monetary indicators, we also care about the quality of advertising and the variety of ad formats. It is just as important that advertising does not negatively affect the user experience in the app, so we don't want to delay loading content while banners are being selected. Given that the app is used in more than 50 countries around the world, an additional bonus for us is the opportunity to monetize a foreign audience. We were able to do this by setting up a system for automatic selection of mobile mediation thresholds and integrating It with international advertising systems."

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