Advertisements are a necessary part of making free-to-play mobile games profitable. But only about half of game developers are confident about their strategies for advertising, according to data from mobile marketing and analytics firm DeltaDNA.
I participated in a webinar with DeltaDNA chief executive Mark Robinson and VB’s Wendy Schuchart about this topic. Here’s a link to the webinar recording. In the webinar, Robinson presented his thoughts on the topic, and I quizzed him about it afterward.
Robinson said that a game’s design has to balance different tensions to keep players engaged.
“Our job is to keep players between two extremes. On the one hand, anxiety….The other aspect of this is that different types of players, maybe more expert players, may find they’re not sufficiently challenged,” Robinson said. “It’s tough in free-to-play. We all realize that. We are trying to balance the experience for different types of players.”
Likewise, you can use ads to keep players more engaged and tailor your ads to different types of players.
Robinson noted that the most common advertising types among developers are rewarded videos and interstitial ads. The least popular: banner ads. But only 54 percent of respondents to the poll (of more than 100 developers) say they are confident about their ad strategies.
Based on the poll, developers are very concerned about problems such as low effective cost per mil (eCPM) rates; adverse effects of ads on player retention; selecting the most effective ad formats; where to place ads in a game; and setting ad frequency for players.
Robinson said that analytics and marketing tools can help apply some science to answering these questions for developers.