Finding the sweet spot between IAPs and ads to enhance the player experience
When developing June’s Journey, our latest story-driven hidden object game, Wooga decided to make rewarded videos an integral part of the game experience and economy for the first time in company history. In fact we wanted to increase revenue from rewarded video ads to about 30% of our overall revenue. So far we’ve mostly been focussing on in-app purchases (IAPs) for our free-to-play games and our aim with this shift was to find the sweet spot between IAPs and ads to enhance the player experience and at the same time increase revenue. Instead of tricking players to watch ads, we wanted to provide tangible benefits in the form of progression or special content with our rewarded video ad features.
In this blog post I would like to outline how we approached that challenge and managed to steadily increase KPIs in the hopes that other ad monetization managers can relate and hopefully take something away from it.
User Experience — How to add real value to the player
Ads should be part of the immersion and the world the player is in. The more relevant the placement is, the less disturbing it is to the player. The reward given should be part of the narrative. Players should feel an intrinsic motivation to watch the ad simply for the powerful rewards they will receive. In June’s Journey specifically players watch ads in the beginning of their session to set up a smooth, ad free experience throughout the rest of the session. This gives a boost to the whole session and feels rewarding with every gameplay.
Forcing ads onto players is an absolute no-go in my opinion. It probably sounds like a no-brainer but a smooth technical integration is important as well to provide a great user experience, so that ads are shown without delays. Technical issues, low quality, inappropriate content or the same ad over and over again probably result in your players churning. Staying up to date with the latest SDKs and sharing player feedback with the networks, helps to improve your tech stack and will lead to a better overall user experience around ads.
Key Takeaway: Start small and start with one ad placement. Also start small in terms of the number of ad networks that you implement to limit technical issues. Depending on the size of the game, you may not need to work with those top 5 partners from the beginning. Choose the ad network that is the best possible fit for your current situation, you can always add more networks into the mix once your game is growing and you have more impressions to sell.
Eligibility — How we decide who we show ads to
Having little data available to draw from when launching June’s Journey, we simply decided to make it our default that all players are eligible to watch ads. Additionally we wanted to integrate ad placements as early as possible in the player’s journey. We had a lot to learn still about ads and thought an early integration would allow us to understand how our players are engaging with the ads. As mentioned before, we put the player experience front and center and with that felt it’s important to onboard them properly and let them establish some sort of personal playing routine before introducing ads. Finding the right moment for this introduction needs some thought and adjustment for each placement. Too early means overwhelming the player, too late can result in the player having a set routine already. For each of the ad placements we integrated into June’s Journey we defined a different approach as to when they would be unlocked:
- Energy Discount: Our most straightforward placement — players watch an ad and get a 30 minutes discount on energy needed to play scenes. It’s easy to understand and therefore introduced already in chapter 2.
- Landmark: The landmark is a specific feature, that contains additional story content for players to discover and an ad placement to speed up timers. In order to understand the value of this special and deeply integrated feature, it is essential to understand the core loop of the game first, which made us introduce it one chapter later than the Energy Discount.
With the game being live now for almost a year, we’ve already learned a lot and incrementally worked on improving ad integrations. We are are still not planning to exclude players from being exposed to ads overall, as we see high ad engagement rates around 90% no matter if it’s players who enjoy the game for free or players who also purchase in-game content.
Key Takeaway: Try to show ads as early as possible in your game, to make sure that engaging with ads becomes part of the playing routine. Do make sure that the core loop of your game has been understood by the player before you let them interact with ads, as you also would not want your player to churn due to an ad integration they didn’t fully understand.
Engagement — How many players actively watch ads
Let’s look at engagement per placement as well. On average 68% of players engage with the Energy Discount and we believe there are three main reasons for this number not being higher: technical issues (e.g. unstable internet connections or no available ads), the UI flow not being clear enough and thus players not understanding how to interact with the ad and lastly available playtime. If a player’s preference is a short session, watching a 30 seconds video ad might simply take up too much session time and is therefore skipped. Additionally the player might not have enough time to use up the energy during one session and feel bad about it.
For the Landmark we see a much higher engagement rate of 80% on average and believe this is highly related to the fact that it gives players additional story content to discover and the reward granted hugely helps to progress faster in the game.
Due to the various different playing routines it is crucial to have multiple placements, with each speaking to specific player profiles. Even though we aim to improve those engagement rates over time, we’re pretty happy to see so many of our players engaging with ads already and are sure that’s thanks to the deep integration into the core loop of the game and therefore real value for our players. Compared to our other games, where we’ve built the ad economy on top of the IAP economy, we see much lower and fluctuating rates between 15–65% depending on the game.
Key Takeaway: Make sure the first ad placement you introduce is a no-brainer and almost self explanatory to the player in terms of how to use it as well as the reward the player receives. Once you got this polished, you can continue to focus on scaling frequency by adding more placements which increase the impressions per watcher.
Frequency — How many ads do engaged players watch on average
I would always recommend to get eligibility and engagement right before you focus on increasing frequency. For our Landmark and Energy Discount placements, June’s Journey players on average watch about 2.5 ads per day.
With the existing Landmark and Energy Discount placements we covered eligibility and engagement and to improve our frequency in June’s Journey, we recently added a third placement called Challenges. Early results of adding this placement show an increased frequency of close to 4 ads watched per day. For all those placements we built in limits by game design as to how many videos can be watched:
- The Landmark allows for one ad every 20 hours.
- The Energy Discount gives a reward that lasts for 30 minutes
- The Challenges placement is, unlike the other two placements, not intrinsically linked to time but player interaction. The more engaged a player is the higher the likelihood of watching multiple videos.
Key Takeaway: Instead of hard limits for how many ads a player can watch per day, design the different ad placements in a way that they reward higher engagement with a higher number of ads to watch.
Bonus Tip
I mentioned a couple of times how important it is to integrate ad placements deeply into the overall user experience for best results. To really achieve this, we changed a simple but we think crucial thing: the ad monetization and game teams sat next to each other. This might sound silly but when sitting closer to the team you work closely with, you automatically communicate more and get a better understanding of the priorities everyone has. I started to attend game team meetings to learn more about their workflow. That way any ad related feature request was treated as a game feature request and therefore prioritized on the business value.
With a smooth and well integrated video ad experience, in which the user experience is front and center and ongoing iterations, we managed to elevate our revenue from ads to 30%, without cannibalizing IAP revenues.
