How AdMob Saved The Day

And what we can learn from it.

I recently received an email from AdMob, which brought my attention to a significant problem that would have easily remained unrealized if they didn’t say anything.

The email basically boiled down to this: I wasn’t showing enough interstitial ads.

The particular game that this concerns uses both interstitial and banner ads, and this email is pointing out that the banner was making 72% of the revenue while the interstitials were only making 28%.

This means that I could have likely made more than 2 times the revenue from interstitials, significantly increasing the apps revenue.

Had I been showing interstitials more often to meet the rate of similar apps, my overall revenue could have increased by 40% had all other factors remained the same.

Of course one could say that increasing the number of interstitial ads might result in less app use by the users, but I think that effect would be minimal due to the common practices of the industry including such frequent ad placements.

Because this caused my app to make notably less revenue than it could have, it is fair to call this a rather significant mistake, and one that should be examined and avoided in the future by others and myself.

Of course the most important question to ask when any mistake is discovered is why that mistake occurred, and more importantly how it can be avoided in the future.

The answer to why the mistake occured goes all the way back to when I first released the app and was changing how frequently the insterstitials should be displayed, as it was the first time I had implemented them.

After I released the app to the store, I decided that the frequency should be lowered, but I didn’t want to release a whole new version with only this adjustment.

“Easy enough,” I thought, and I just limited their frequency with Google’s frequency capping tool, like so:

This allowed me to decrease the display frequency without releasing an update, which was just what I wanted.

Little did I consider that that setting of limiting 1 impression per 15 minutes would cause a rather significant decrease in revenue.

It was only after I received the email that I removed that frequency cap and allowed the interstitial revenue to return to a reasonable level.

After seeing that this caused such a significant reduction in my ad revenue, you may understandably bring into question why I was messing with ad frequency in the first place.

It all comes back to the ad optimization problem I discussed in an earlier post.

It boils down to the fact that interstitial ads can be a significant annoyance to the user, while at the same time they are one of the most lucrative ad types for developers.

This causes an intricate problem in which the user experience and ad revenue need to be compromised and balanced through optimizing the display frequency.

You may think that I would just say to never use Google’s frequency capping after the problems that it caused me, but that is not the case at all.

Instead, you should feel free to use frequency capping to fine-tune that balance between user experience and revenue that is so crucial to get right. However, you should never leave it on extreme settings of capping.

1 impression per 15 minutes, as I had it set, is definitely an extreme setting. In all honesty, I set it at that level to simply make sure the capping was working, and I ended up never setting it back.

Of course this shines light on a crucial lesson of software development in general: Remember to revert changes you make for experimentation/testing as necessary.

This comes up more than you might think, such as with a mobile game where I accidentally left a frame rate and node counter in the bottom corner (whoops!)

In my case, this mistake did not cost me too much, as I only wrote this game as a hobbyist project and I was not depending on it to provide general income or support a business.

As a result, I managed to learn an invaluable lesson without much cost. However, it is easy to see how on a larger scale such a mistake would be very unforgiving.

Thus, do yourself a favor and watch those caps!

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