Grow Your Games Business With New Ads Solutions
Whether it’s to join the latest multiplayer craze or dive back into an old favorite, user interest in gaming worldwide continues to rise as people spend more time at home. In fact, our data shows that global searches for “best online games” between February and April were up over 100 percent compared to the same time last year.
Mobile game developers have a huge opportunity to connect with these eager players around the globe. This week at Think Games in China, we’re announcing new ways for developers to engage with the right players and maximize revenue so your team can spend more time creating awesome gaming experiences.
Reach more of the right players for your game
In today’s crowded gaming landscape, it’s not easy to build a community and retain players over time. App campaigns for engagement were built to help you get players who’ve previously installed your game to return, with custom messages across Search, YouTube and over 1 million apps in our network.
Available globally in September, App campaigns for engagement will soon also run in Google Play and support audiences from Google Analytics for Firebase. We’re also updating our audience management features to make it easier for you to connect with the right player segments.
App campaigns for engagement will soon be able to serve ads in the Play Store
FunPlus, the developers behind the mobile strategy game King of Avalon, wanted to find ways to also get current players to come back during a mega update event. It used App campaigns for engagement to create custom messages for previous player groups who had stopped playing. This resulted in 34 percent more high-value players returning to play, as compared to other strategies it used.
To get started with App campaigns for engagement, make sure you set up deep linking and app conversion tracking, and use a supported measurement solution like Google Analytics for Firebase or one of our App Attribution Partners.
Here are a few more features designed to help you reach players across the lifecycle of your game:
- App campaigns for pre-registration: Get a head start in building an excited community for your game before it launches. Learn more.
- Maximize conversions bidding for App campaigns for installs: Drive as many installs as possible within a set budget to reach your campaign goals. Learn more.
- Target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS) open beta for App campaigns for installs: Adjust your bids dynamically based on the value each user is likely to bring for your game. Available later this year to all advertisers bidding on Google Analytics for Firebase events. Learn more.
- Creative simplification: Simplify your creative development process by creating image ads only in 1.91:1, 1:1, and 4:5 aspect ratios. You can also crop existing image assets to these aspect ratios with our new cropping tool. Learn more.
Maximize your ad revenue
To help you get the most value from your ads, Open Bidding will be available as a beta to all AdMob developers this fall. Today, many developers rely solely on waterfall mediation, a tried-and-true way to monetize with multiple advertising sources that can be hard to set up and manage at scale. Waterfall mediation calls ad networks one at a time until one of them returns an ad. Though effective, you could be losing out on additional revenue since networks are prioritized based on historical CPMs, rather than real-time pricing.
As Google’s in-app bidding solution, Open Bidding puts participating networks in a fair real-time auction to compete for your impressions, so the winner is always the highest paying network. This means you’ll get the highest revenue available for every impression. With Open Bidding, you can find the most popular demand sources to compete for your impressions in real time. Open Bidding makes earning more even easier by eliminating the need to manually set CPMs and reducing the number of SDKs your teams need to integrate and manage.
CookApps used Open Bidding in order to grow revenue for its match-three puzzle game Candy Blast. By switching to Open Bidding, CookApps optimized revenue across ad networks and saw a 26 percent increase in both total ad revenue and CPMs, compared to their previous waterfall mediation setup. Open Bidding also enabled teams to save time from managing multiple networks, allowing it to focus on other priorities to expand its business.
Along with Open Bidding, we’re announcing several other solutions to simplify your setup so you can earn even more from your apps:
- Impression-level LTV pingback: Get real-time estimates of impression values to help measure lifetime value of players across all revenue sources (iOS, Android, Unity).
- Rewarded interstitials: Increase engagement with rewarded ads by proactively showing players in-game offers in exchange for watching a video during gameplay breaks.
- App open beta: See up to twice as much user engagement with the improved user experience of app open ads, which now offer standardized publisher branding and simplified user tap targets.Learn more.
- AdMob plug-in for Unity software: Create and edit ads easily in the Unity interface, letting you quickly implement ads into your Unity game with just a single line of code.
To hear more about how these solutions can help you build your community and grow your business, watch the Ads Announcements session and tune in to the full Think Games live stream.
Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog
It’s not surprising that the highest trending term on Google is “best online games”…that is most likely because everyone is at home now, staying safe…playing video games… lOL We just put our game on the play store and are working on building a better base for our ad campaign. Thanks for these tips, you have some really amazing tips on this site.
It’s wonderful that you found the tips on our site helpful! It’s true that the pandemic has led to more people staying at home and looking for ways to entertain themselves, which has contributed to the rise in searches for online games. Best of luck with your game and your ad campaign!
Many gamers have been discouraged by the number of well, sorry for the term, ‘unnecessary’ advertisements that flash through their screens while playing the applications. On a personal note, I have experienced this way too many times that I opted to delete the application itself. I ultimately believe that there is a need for companies to create a better gaming experience for their consumers, not just randomly providing advertisements. There is a need for them to provide or develop advertisements that are indeed catching their attention. I believe any gamer would be able to agree with me, right? Also for gaming applications to be well trusted or for them to attract a lot of consumers as well.
I completely agree with you! Companies need to find a balance between advertising and providing a good gaming experience. If the ads are too frequent or intrusive, it can negatively impact the user’s experience and drive them away. But if they are well-placed and relevant to the user, they can enhance the gaming experience and even be beneficial for the company. It’s important for companies to prioritize the user experience and find creative ways to integrate advertising without disrupting gameplay.
I’ve learned that advertising that is extremely sales-y or pushy is more likely to be disregarded. This post inspired me to test out a new native advertising tool to increase interaction and create advertisements that can make my audience trust my brand.
That’s a great approach, Ralph! Native advertising can be a more subtle and effective way to promote your brand, as it blends seamlessly with the content and context of the platform. Best of luck with your new tool!