An Overview of the Top Paying CPI Mobile Ads

“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”

Anyone who doesn’t know Elaine is missing out on a lot. A LOT. Not only is she a great person, he is super smart and super motivated. True story – when I was heading home after Chad’s App Empire event, I saw Elaine walking to breakfast, laptop in hand, to “slay some Revmob integrations.” She’d been up for 4 hours already. What a gangster. For anyone interested, I definitely recommend checking out the rest of her stuff at The Chocolate Lab Apps. She’s a great teacher and even has a course that’s been very helpful for a lot of people.  – Carter
There are a few simple ways to increase your advertising revenue.
1. Show more ads. Usually this means making new games, adding an extra ad to an existing app (don’t go too crazy though) or increasing your user retention so people stay playing your games for longer. More time in your game = more ad impressions = hopefully more installs.
2. Filter your ads. You can choose to show ads that you think will appeal to your target demographic. So if you’re making kids games, show ads for other kids games. This should mean more installs for every ad shown.
3. Bigger payouts. Increase how much you get paid when people install a free game.
The first two points above are fairly self-explanatory. For the third, the secret to getting paid more money for ads is to find out which ads are paying the most money and see if you can target them.
Go to campaign > analytics and put in the options below. To to this accurately you’ll have to have no ad filters set up in your campaigns.
Chartboost
The file will be too large to view so after about 30 seconds you’ll be able to open the CSV file. Open it in excel or similar.
First do a ‘find and replace’ to remove all of the $ signs. Now create a pivot table.
Excel
Select all the content in the spreadsheet, and then (in Office 2010 for PC) you can create a pivot table by selecting “insert > pivot table” from the top menu area.
office2010
When the grey popup box appears, be sure and select the ‘new worksheet’ option.

Now that you have your pivot table created in a new sheet. You should revise the parameters to show Row labels: “App Name” and Values: “Impressions”, “Click”, “Installs”, and “Money earned”. You can select these in the pivot table on the right of the screen.

Go into the ‘row labels’ column, so drag them as needed to the ‘values’ column.
Then you need to change update the ‘impressions, clicks, installs, money earned’ to the SUM of. You can do this as in this screenshot, for each of the 4 columns.

So select ‘sum’ instead of ‘count’ for these 3 columns. Save this file as an xls / xlsx file, and then copy all the data in this sheet into a new blank sheet. Create one extra column (seen here in green) and call it money per install. Then put filters along the top headings in all of the columns.
Filters
Money per install = Sum of Money Earned / Sum of Installs. In this case, I will type this into the first cell under ‘Money per install’ =E5/D5 and then copy this the whole way down, so it automatically generates the CPI of each ad. Then I use the filter on ‘Money per install’ and select it to show from largest to smallest.
Here is the list of top paying ads per install. Note this is a very good indicator but not quite exact…
1. The ‘sum of money’ earned column also includes any clicks paid for these ads as well. This pay very little so I’ve ignored them for now and they shouldn’t make a big difference.
2. From what I understand these CPIs are 70% of what the advertiser actually pays, with the ad company you signed up to taking 30% commission or thereabouts. Also worth noting if you qualify for direct deals you can get 90% of what the advertiser is paying.
Ads
So what can we learn from these stats? What ads pay the most when people click on them in your game and install the promoted free game? Stats change every minute of course, but here’s whats happening now….
– 21 games are paying more than $2 eCPM right now
– The highest eCPM by far is Bingo Rush which is paying approx. $5.60 per install
– 9/21 (42%) top CPIs are for casino games. This is the biggest category.
– 8/21 (38%) are fantasy games. Nearly as many.
– Then there’s a crime game, a war game, a sports game and a game called ‘BoA’ if you can figure that one out 😉
Ads
So two massive game types are dominating the top paying ads list – casino and fantasy games.
The question is: how do you plan to use this information to your advantage?
Learn more about maximizing Chartboost revenue in your iPhone apps by checking out my course here.

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