Monetization solution providers

1. Overview

In the previous tutorial you explored Free-to-play revenue tactics. In this tutorial you will be exploring some of the key partners and solutions to take note of in your monetization efforts. There’s more than just you, your game, your players, and advertisers willing to pay you.

To truly set yourself up for success, having a basic knowledge of your options and how to evaluate them will be critical. At the most basic level, an IAP plugin allows you to seamlessly integrate purchasing in your game, while ad networks allow you to sell ad space in your game at scale. There are other middlemen in the industry such as ad mediators, who help you manage several ad networks.

You’ll take a deeper look at your options in this section, as well as provide some guidance in evaluating what you should consider trying out, and who you should consider partnering with based on your game and your goals.

In this tutorial you'll:

• Examine and evaluate the different monetization 3rd party solution providers

• Distinguish the differences between native and paid 3rd party IAP plugins

• Investigate what to consider when selecting ad networks

• Compare different ad mediator solutions

• Examine what to consider when measuring efficacy of analytics providers

• Reflect on the easiest ways to monetize a new game

2. Key partner ecosystem

The ecosystem of monetization solutions is large and sometimes daunting, but there is no reason to be overwhelmed by it. This section will help you navigate this ecosystem and make decisions on what types of partners to test out based on your game’s and your organization’s unique needs.

There are a variety of 3rd party solutions available for various monetization needs, including IAP plugins, ad networks, ad mediators, analytics providers, and more. Here we will cover some of the major ones.

As you go through each of these categories of partners, make sure to take note of your budget, the scale of your game, and the dedicated resources you have on hand to fully leverage the benefits of each partner.

3. IAP Plugins

In-app purchases, as they are a native part of your game, are typically provided by the platform on which you develop your game, such as Unity. There are, however, 3rd party IAP plugins with varying functionality which can also be integrated.

You might choose to implement an IAP solution natively through your development platform. Alternatively, you might decide to leverage a LiveOps (Live Operations) provider, which is a company or a part of a company focused primarily on helping you optimize management of your game after it is live.

Deciding between these routes depends on:

• Your unique needs and balancing cost

• Ease of implementation

• Robust feature sets

Leveraging a quality third-party LiveOps provider is common for larger publishers as they can more easily justify the cost and free up their time and resources to be spent on other aspects of their games.

Smaller studios and indie developers, by contrast, may opt to leverage a low cost or free solution already integrated in their game development platform to cover the basics. Unity offers such a solution to enable developers to get started at no cost. To access it, go to the Package Manager and install In App Purchases.

4. Ad Networks

The mobile ad ecosystem has become increasingly complex with different networks having different targeting capabilities and algorithms, as well as access to different sets of buyers. Some may have specialized reach in certain regions, while some are global.

All have different ways of valuing what an ad is worth at a specific time in a specific place for a specific user. For these reasons, many developers choose to experiment with 3-5 reputable ad networks, giving them diversification of demand sources while limiting to a manageable number of partners.

A few things to take note of when selecting ad networks are as follows:

Reach:

Get a sense of how much demand flows through any network you are evaluating, and compare them to other networks. Networks typically have some statistical measure of this which they are willing to disclose

Gaming vs non-gaming:

Some ad networks specialize in gaming. This may give them unique access and insights into both the players who will respond well to ads, as well as the gaming advertisers who can deliver the most value to you as a publisher. This doesn’t necessarily mean you should only use gaming-specific ad networks, as some non-gaming-specific networks have huge reach which is also of value, but it’s something to keep in mind as you are experimenting with different networks. Ultimately, the total revenue driven by these networks is what matters most, so testing both gaming-specific and non-gaming-specific networks will give you a sense of whether the specialization or the broad reach delivers more value for you over time.

Technical drag on your game:

Different ad network software development kits, or (SDKs), which are installable packages that enable their use, have varying implementations. Make sure that any time you add a new SDK you are able to get a read on whether there is an impact to crash rates, lags in gameplay, or poor user experience. For these reasons, you typically shouldn’t add more than one new network at a time.

5. Ad Mediators

For those developers leveraging several ad networks, ad mediation partners exist to help developers organize this process and prioritize which network serves an impression when given the opportunity.

This prioritization, or “waterfall”, pre-ranks ad networks based on the prices they have historically generated, giving the top ranked network the first chance at serving an ad.

If that network cannot serve the ad at the specified price level, the mediator moves to the next network, and so on. Depending on the mediation provider, the pre-ranking process may be:

• Manual

• Automated

Manual mediation

This is an important distinction as manual mediation allows for full flexibility and control over how networks are ranked.

Automated Mediation

Automated mediation can free up a significant amount of time in optimization.

Hybrid Approach

Many developers as a result may use a hybrid approach in setting up automated mediation while maintaining the ability to override as they see fit. For example, if there is a particular network that they trust more in serving high quality ads to preserve a rich user experience, they may decide to prioritize their ranking even if they don’t necessarily have the strongest history of driving revenue as identified by an automated solution.

The risk in mediation is that an impression may not always be delivered to the highest bidder, just the network that has been prioritized based on historical performance.

Some solutions, including Unity, offer Unified Auctions which negate this risk by introducing the ability to have all ad sources bid against one another for each impression, ensuring the highest bidder does actually win the impression. Nonetheless, mediation is a very popular method for serving ads through multiple partners at multiple price points.

6. Manual mediation

Most mediation solutions allow publishers the ability to rank which ad networks get priority to serve a placement at various price points.

This may be based on past performance, preference or trust in specific networks, or deals that have been made with specific networks. Larger companies may have teams dedicated entirely to managing mediation manually due to unique and constantly changing priorities.

For an indie developer, using mediation at all may not be necessary until their monetization reaches a greater level of maturity, scale, and complexity. Even at that point, manual mediation is not recommended due to the limited resources that a younger, smaller operation is likely to have.

7. Automated mediation

Some mediators automatically set and reset the priority of ad networks. This is typically based on historical performance over a certain period of time. Mediators that offer automated waterfall setup typically also offer the ability to manually override that setup.

If you run ads with multiple partners, have many different ad placements in your game, and have at least one person in your organization dedicated to managing ads, then mediation could be an appropriate solution for you.

Make sure to do your research and vet each mediator's capabilities, including manual vs automated network rankings, ease of setup, experimentation capabilities, and reporting.

The core concept of mediation is standard across the board in that it is a tool to help publishers maximize aggregate revenue from many ad placements across multiple ad networks, but these individual features and value propositions may vary significantly by partner so knowing which capabilities are most integral to your operations moving forward will help you decide which mediator to use, or whether to use mediation at all.

8. Measuring efficacy of analytics providers

Once you have implemented any ads or IAP in your game, it is important to have an effective way to measure their efficacy based on your specific needs.

This may include analysis into the following:

Ability to measure impact of ads by network

When many different partners are integrated into your game, an analytics partner should be able to measure impact across all of them.

Ability to measure the interplay between ads, IAP, and gameplay

Ads may be cannibalizing revenue from IAP, or disrupting gameplay if they are not placed with the player experience in mind. Any one metric may go up as a result of a change, but an analytics provider should be able to measure the total value across all revenue and user experience touchpoints.

User-level revenue

Most reporting sources can report total revenue, or revenue from particular sources. Some can provide revenue driven by specific users. This level granularity can help you further tailor how to deliver content or custom experiences to users of differing value.

Cost and value

Evaluate what you think the revenue impact is in measuring impact effectively. That impact should be greater than any associated cost of the analytics provider. If it isn’t, you may want to seek an alternative.

Ad networks can typically provide analysis for ads served through their own network but not others. Ad mediators can typically provide analysis for ads served through all networks but not for IAP revenue. 3rd party analytics or LiveOps providers may provide a full picture of revenue and lifetime value (LTV) but require more investment. Where you decide to land on this spectrum of analytics providers is heavily dependent on your unique mix of budget, desired knowledge and insight, and type of game.

Now take a moment to analyse your analytics provider(s) if you already are at this stage. Reflect back on the four points above in relation to your game to analyse how efficient your existing providers are.

If you still haven’t decided on an analytics provider, it’s a good idea to do some research taking the above points into consideration.

9. Analytics Providers Scenario: A hypercasual game with no in-game economy

For example, if you have a hyper casual game with no in-game economy where users can make purchases or accumulate items of value, you might only be monetizing through ads. (The in-game economy of a game is the system in which players can attain items of value and use them to progress more efficiently through the game.)

What type of currency could you include?

The most obvious example of this may include a type of currency which can be used for purchases in the game.

However, it can also include things like lives or power-ups which facilitate game progression. In the case where your game does not have an in-game economy, your ad networks or mediator may give you the necessary level of detail for your needs, including revenue, eCPM, and fill rate.

On the other hand, if you want to be able to detect the direct impact on revenue and retention when you add a new ad placement in your game, that may require integrating with a 3rd party given the added complexity of the insight. It’s easy to say that deeper, richer analytics are always better, but practically it is important to evaluate whether that level of insight comes at a cost you can absorb, and gives you information that you have the time and resources to actually act upon.

Also note that this may change over time - as your game and business scale, you may find that you need deeper analytics to continue optimizing and growing at the same pace as before. If you anticipate this happening, it can be a good idea to “future proof” your analytics to include deeper data analysis which you might need at a later stage of your game.

The most basic level of insight is total revenue driven by each individual monetization source. The biggest flaw with this is a limited view of how this affects your game holistically, as certain high revenue ads or IAP may create poor gameplay experiences and cause players to leave.

On the other side of the spectrum, full lifetime value attributed across ads and IAP provides the optimal level of insight to act on in growing your game. This typically is measured as the total revenue across all revenue sources over a period of time of the publisher’s choosing. The timeframe often used to measure lifetime value usually depends on the type of game.

10. Analytics Providers Scenario: A hypercasual game with players who play a few times and then stop

For example, a hypercasual game may have a lot of users who play a few times and then stop, in which case a measure of success may be revenue generated over a shorter window like 7 days. A game targeting mid-core or hardcore gamers, on the other hand, may look at revenue over 30 days as a greater indicator of success as it more closely mirrors a typical user’s behavior in this type of game.

Lifetime value analysis typically shows that an ad or IAP placement not only drove a certain amount of revenue, but also measures the impact on the user engaging with your game. This allows you to evaluate how your monetization touchpoints (ad placements and in-app purchasing opportunities) are delivering sustainable value rather than just short-term wins.

While “lifetime value” implies an infinite view of revenue, most lifetime value analysis measures the revenue driven over a specified time period, commonly 7 days or 30 days. The impediment here with using a third party is typically cost, as it involves a single partner gathering information across all revenue sources and effectively modelling causality.

Many developers tend to find an analytics solution falling somewhere in between the two example scenarios you have just examined. As your business grows, you may find yourself needing to move toward the more sophisticated end of offerings in the market.

At this stage, you may be wondering what the easiest ways to monetize a game are. Let's ask the experts!

11. Ask the experts!

Would you like to hear more from an expert ? Watch Cathal and Illya, both Unity monetization experts, discuss these questions:

1. What are the easiest ways to monetize a new game?

12. Summary

In this tutorial, you have examined and evaluated the different Monetization 3rd party solution providers, distinguished the differences between native and paid 3rd party IAP plugins, investigated what to consider when selecting ad networks You also compared different Ad mediator solutions, examined what to consider when measuring efficacy of analytics providers and recognized how developers can make more money than they spend.

In the next tutorial you will start the Acquiring your users project where you will learn ways you can acquire your users and create a successful user acquisition campaign.

You'll:

• Analyse different types of UA

• Explore pricing models

• Consider your KPIs for success

• Evaluate a range of metrics to identify how to measure your results

• Consider the relationship between marketing and actual gameplay and game design

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