MAX — AppLovin’s mediation platform — helps publishers enhance and optimize their monetization efforts through the largest selection of network bidders in the industry and a suite of robust features. MAX also helps publishers automate their monetization, and ensures pricing accuracy for a more fair auction.
The challenge
A publisher of popular word and trivia games is running both bidding and non-bidding networks in the unified auction on MAX. Their waterfall setup includes multiple geo-based waterfalls with specific price grouping, which allows them to optimize revenue by each country set. They also use real-time reporting to ensure both ad unit and revenue performance are tracking according to their expectations.
To ensure their non-bidding networks are participating in the unified auction with accurate pricing they must update those network CPMs on a regular basis to align with what the network is paying them. Having to manually update CPMs increases their operational load and heightens the risk of human error, which could lead to reduced revenues. They needed a solution to maximize revenue for each ad opportunity by ensuring their networks are winning the auction at the highest, most accurate CPM.
The approach
With help from the MAX team, the publisher leveraged our Auto CPM feature to automate updating their network CPMs. They also used our Network Comparison report to quickly identify CPM discrepancies with networks, and Advanced Reporting to monitor revenue performance through daily reports sent to their email. Here’s how everything works together…
Auto CPM automates network CPM updates
MAX’s Auto CPM allowed the publisher to connect to network revenue data through an API and auto-update CPMs for their non-bidding networks. This happens on a daily basis so the network can compete accurately against the real-time pricing of bidding networks. Auto CPM also supports country-level granularity, so their geo-based waterfalls can also benefit from automated CPM updating and reporting. With Auto CPM, manual updates are eliminated and considerably less time is spent on waterfall operations.
Ensuring CPM alignment with Network Comparison
Added to their arsenal is Network Comparison reporting, which allows the publisher to see and ensure accuracy between network-reported data and MAX-reported data. This helps them make sure that the data powering auto CPM and bidding is accurate, and that impressions are also aligned between MAX and their networks. This further contributes to time-saving measures in their organization by helping them avoid running reports across multiple platforms to identify network discrepancies. It also gave them the confidence they weren’t missing out on revenue due to inaccurate pricing.
Deep insights with Advanced Reporting
Advanced Reporting is a comprehensive, customizable reporting tool that allows publishers to track their apps’ monetization and receive insights to optimize performance. The report shows real-time analytics on their revenue performance, as well as ad health insights with metrics like show rate and display rate for ad units like rewarded video. This allowed them to identify issues that could be blocking cached ads from becoming impressions. Furthermore, the ability to schedule reports to be emailed — as opposed to having to pull reports from within the MAX UI — saves them even more time.
The overall results
Between Auto CPM, Network Comparison reporting, and Advanced Reporting, operational streamlining and optimization have both been achieved and continue to greatly improve for this accomplished app publisher. Additionally, the chances of unseen and increasing errors have been drastically minimized through automation and detailed analyses providing in-depth performance information for their ad stack. This culminates in more performant and less complicated bidding and waterfall operations, freeing up their team and giving that time back to managing and optimizing their app roster.
To learn more about automating your bidding and waterfall operations, speak to your MAX account representative today, or submit a request to our developer support team.
