In-app advertising is a crucial part of any comprehensive marketing strategy. Advertisers rely on it to deploy contextually relevant campaigns to global audiences while its performance-driven growth capabilities make it an effective tool for the most data-driven marketing teams.

As the technologies that enable mobile advertising become more powerful, marketers and publishers are consistently presented with new opportunities to engage with their audiences. All you need is the right mobile advertising partner — and that’s where Tapjoy comes in.

What is Tapjoy?

Tapjoy is a premium mobile advertising network and monetization platform for the world’s leading advertisers and app developers. Brands and app marketers work with Tapjoy to deploy cutting-edge campaigns that leverage the latest in mobile advertising technology. Developers utilize Tapjoy’s comprehensive suite of monetization tools to generate the greatest possible value from their user base.

Tapjoy’s SDK has reached one billion mobile devices across the world, and we have no intention of slowing down. Tapjoy’s headquarters are based in San Francisco, with satellite offices located in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Chicago, Boston, New York, London, Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing.

How does Tapjoy work?

Tapjoy connects advertisers with their ideal mobile customers through ads placed in one of the world’s largest networks of mobile games and apps. Our value-exchange ad products include rewarded ad placements and mobile offerwalls, which allow players to view ads and take desired actions specified by advertisers in exchange for virtual currency. Developers and publishers earn revenue on every ad shown, while advertisers connect with highly engaged, targeted audience segments. The Tapjoy SDK is integrated in over 30,000 mobile apps that serve more than 800 million active users every month.

What solutions does Tapjoy offer?

Our mobile advertising solutions let advertisers connect with their ideal mobile customers, while our mobile monetization platform empowers developers to maximize mobile ad revenue. We offer the following business solutions to our clients and publishing partners:

For Marketers & Advertisers

• User Acquisition: Tapjoy makes it easy for mobile marketers and user acquisition professionals to connect with their ideal audience and grow their user base at a profit through a network of the world’s most popular mobile games and apps.
• Brand Awareness: The world’s leading B2C marketers trust us to help them achieve their brand awareness goals through contextually relevant, brand-safe media buys. Our premium in-app advertisements reach audiences of all backgrounds and help leading brands capture mindshare in competitive markets.
• Performance Marketing: We offer marketers a variety of performance-driven pricing models that help us align with our customers and work together to achieve the business outcomes that matter most to them.
• Market Research: Our integrated market research solutions give brand marketers access to the single largest sample group of mobile gamers in the world. Our integrated research solution makes it quick and easy to surface actionable insights for priority market segments that lead to effective go-to-market strategies.
• Creative Services: Tapjoy’s in-house creative department, Interplay Studios, is an award-winning team of design professionals that help our marketing and advertising clients get the most out of our products. With Interplay, we offer end-to-end creative support that ensures ads resonate with their target audience.

For Developers & Publishers

• Game & App Monetization: Our comprehensive suite of mobile monetization solutions help developers generate more revenue from their apps through digital merchandising, dynamic app experiences and live-ops management.
• Programmatic Ad Mediation: Tapdaq by Tapjoy gives developers and publishers the tools they need to optimize their ad inventory and ensure that they generate the highest possible revenue from their app portfolio using a hybrid mediation model.
• Rewarded Ad Placements: Tapjoy’s value-exchange ad solutions make it easy for developers to monetize the majority of their players who won’t complete an IAP while fostering greater engagement with their virtual economies and generating ad revenue.
• Mobile Offerwalls: Since inventing the mobile offerwall, Tapjoy has continued to innovate and refine it to become one of the most beloved and profitable ad monetization solutions available. Our offerwall let developers stimulate their virtual economies while generating some of the highest CPMs in the market through a variety of rewarded ad placements.

Since 2007, Tapjoy has received multiple awards and industry commendations. Here are a few recent examples:

• We’ve ranked in both volume and performance on Appsflyer’s mobile index.
• Presented with the Best Mobile Campaign award at the 2018 ThinkLA IDEA awards show for its partnership with Vizeum Global.
• Chief Revenue Officer Shannon Jessup received one of four MGS 2018 mBolden awards.
• Recognized as a top advertising platform on Tenjin’s 2017 ad monetization report.

Tapjoy helps our customers build memorable brands, scale app portfolios, monetize user bases, and engage valuable audiences around the world. If you’re a mobile publisher or marketer and would like to learn more about Tapjoy, visit our website and be sure to follow us across social media and on relevant industry databases:

• Twitter — Tapjoy
• LinkedIn — Tapjoy
• Instagram — Tapjoy
• LinkedIn — Tapjoy
• Medium — Tapjoy
• YouTube — Tapjoy
• Crunchbase — Tapjoy
• Glassdoor — Tapjoy

For more insights into the world of mobile marketing, check out Tapjoy’s popular on-site resources like “In-App Advertising Cost — The Complete Marketer’s Guide”.

Tapjoy Is Your Trusted Partner In Mobile Advertising And App Monetization was originally published in Tapjoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The movement to cultivate an equal opportunity workplace takes many forms in 2019. One of the most promising is Fairygodboss, a career development website specifically designed by and for women. Millions of users visit Fairygodboss each month to search for jobs, find leadership advice, or conduct research on how businesses treat female employees. Tapjoy recently met with Fairygodboss Senior Director of User Acquisition Ngozi Ogbonna to discuss the unique challenges of building a women-focused career community.

What We Learned:

• The future is female — Gender equality and diversity are dominating the cultural zeitgeist of 2019.
• Communities create change — Fairygodboss users are self-driven and ambitious, but also work together to create inroads for women across tech and financial industries.
• Men can also support equality — When men support the visibility and voices of female colleagues, it empowers everyone to transform workplaces for the better.

Hi, Ngozi. Thanks very much for speaking with us. Can you start by telling us about Fairygodboss, and your role within the organization?

Fairygodboss is the largest career community for women. We provide millions of women with career connections, jobs, community advice, and hard-to-find intel about how companies treat women. I’m the Senior Director of User Acquisition, so my role is primarily focused on driving growth via paid and organic media channels.

As a platform, Fairygodboss is geared towards an audience of professional women — a group that has been historically underserved. Does that create any unique challenges from a growth perspective?

Fairygodboss is really unique in that it’s a platform that not only provides really great content and articles for career-minded women, but where women can also apply to jobs at top companies across the US — companies who care about gender equality and supporting women in their work spaces; where they can read real company reviews by women, for women about what it’s like to work at those companies, what the benefits are like, whether women can grow and get promoted there, whether women are paid fairly, and other hard to get intel; as well as access a community of millions of peers to get advice, have meaningful discussions and connect with. Additionally, Fairygodboss also sponsors and produces virtual and physical events around topics about women in the workplace.

One challenge is that across those different value propositions, we have a lot of competitors who also do some of those things. I believe the unique opportunity for Fairygodboss is our community. Our users are driven and ambitious about developing their own careers, but are also determined to help other women advance as well.

What does monetization look like for a unique platform like Fairygodboss? Are there challenges you face that similar websites do not? Are there lessons from other digital companies that proved successful here?

Fairygodboss is a marketplace where we’re building a community of women who are engaged and interested in developing a career that fits their overall life. And on the other side, we’re partnering with companies that are actively looking to attract and recruit those women.

Fairygodboss wants to create an inclusive community where women feel empowered to speak their minds and give honest reviews about their employers. Like any other review site, we rely on the wisdom of the community to convey the truth about a particular company. And anonymity is important to us. While some reviewers register using their work email addresses, others don’t feel comfortable doing so, and we respect that. We look at other platforms that feature user generated content like Indeed or Glassdoor, who have done this well, to see how they’re managing and enforcing their content guidelines. Our content guidelines were crafted in consultation with Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, so that’s something we take very seriously.

From a user engagement standpoint, I like what digital-first brands like Away and Casper are doing. Luggage and mattresses are infrequent purchases, and they both do a great job of continuing to engage their consumers throughout their lifecycles. For us, whether you’re an active job seeker, are just looking for career development advice or want to support the mission of improving the workplace for women, we want Fairygodboss to become a regular destination for you.

Fairygodboss generates profiles on a wide range of employers, from small nonprofits to massive corporate firms. Are there particular industries or business structures that seem particularly supportive of gender equality? Is there any field showing impressive advances in recent years?

We’re seeing the desire for meaningful diversity and inclusion initiatives across a myriad of industries and company sizes. There have been tons of independent studies confirming that diverse teams and organizations are more profitable and successful. Specific fields that are really striving to make more inroads are the tech and financial industries. Collectively, we still have a long way to go in terms of mitigating gender inequality in all workplaces — especially in historically male-dominated industries.

You’re also a co-chair for mBolden and a member of the board for Urban Bush Women. Are there any common themes you see between women’s communities for tech and the arts? Are there any obstacles that make them distinct?

Yes, both organizations are focused on supporting and elevating the voices of women who are underserved in their respective spaces. Showcasing the huge community of leaders and talent that don’t get the recognition they deserve — despite positively impacting and leading innovation in their industries. Both communities are continuing to challenge and make some process in changing those narratives.

What would you personally like to see men in mobile and tech industries do to support their female colleagues?

I think inequality is fostered by the lack of access and opportunities. I would love to see more male colleagues support the visibility and voices of their female colleagues in the workplace. We should all be empowered to challenge existing systems and be the change agents to transform workplace cultures.

Are there any current or upcoming mobile trends or technologies that you find particularly exciting?

The conversations around data — data unification, privacy, transparency, and accuracy — are exciting to me. As performance marketers, we want to measure everything. But we have access to so much data, and with continued legislative and platform changes on how we can collect and use that data — the challenge is figuring out how we can best apply the data in an actionable way. AI and machine learning are helping to solve that problem.

Are there any untapped opportunities for gender equality initiatives like Fairygodboss that you’d like to see more focus on? Are there similar projects someone else is working on that you wish Fairygodboss could be a part of?

Culturally, gender equality and diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives centered around career-minded women are dominating the zeitgeist right now. It’s exciting to see organizations that are focused around that intersection like mBolden, The Wing, Elpha and The Cru continue to expand. The future is female, and I’m excited for all of us to work together to shift the culture and effect lasting change for the next generations.

Tapjoy would like to thank Ngozi Ogbonna for taking the time to join us. For more insights from our Mobile Champions, check out our interview with Playtika’s Jeet Niyogi.

Originally published at https://www.tapjoy.com on April 29, 2019.

Ngozi Ogbonna — Women-Led Communities Can Transform The Workplace — tapjoy.com was originally published in Tapjoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

App: Design Home

Developer: Glu Mobile

Launch Date: November 17, 2016

The Skinny
Design Home lets you live the life of an interior decorator by decorating a variety of cool and unusual rooms and houses, from island getaway homes to luxury high-rise apartments. Pick from a huge variety of furniture and accessories from high-end, real-world brands like Design Within Reach, Serena & Lily, Taylor Burke Home and more. It also offers PvP action through interactive design challenges that pit players against one another to see who can design the best room according to their peers. It’s a great opportunity to sharpen your interior design skills by creating the home of your dream!

The Numbers
In its first year, Design Home generated 30 million downloads and brought in $71.5 billion for Glu. At that time, the company reported that the game had more than a million DAUs, who had designed 500 million rooms altogether. Earlier this month, Glu CEO Nick Earl credited Design Home (along with the Kim Kardashian franchise) with the company’s recent growth, which was up 43% year-over-year in Q1.

Virtual Economy
Design Home employs a dual economy in which Cash and Diamonds are used to buy things like furniture and accessories. The storefront offers plenty to choose from, from the most basic furniture to the finest accoutrements. You can also purchase Keys for taking part in challenges and voting in competitions. Diamonds can be bought via IAP or earned for free through Tapjoy by watching rewarded videos or taking part in our Offerwall Plus.

The Consensus
Design Home gets five out of five stars from Tapjoy for its originality, fun factor, well-balanced economy, and impressive array of virtual items and big design brands.

Tapjoy’s App of the Month: Design Home by Glu Mobile was originally published in Tapjoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The big week is finally here! With Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation set to take effect on Friday, May 25, we are updating our publisher guidelines, privacy policy, publisher terms, and advertiser terms to complement the behind-the-scenes work we’ve done to support compliance across the Tapjoy platform.

What’s Changed in the Terms?
For advertisers and publishers, GDPR compliance is now an express requirement for use of our services in the GDPR coverage zone. We’ve changed our minimum-age requirements to be in line with GDPR requirements and have updated our terms to include a commercial partner DPA to cover data provided by publishers and advertisers to Tapjoy. Other changes include simplified attribution window language in the advertiser terms, clarified publisher guidelines, support for programmatic mediation in the publisher terms, and a privacy policy rewritten to make it easier for end users (data subjects) to understand what information we collect and how it’s used.

Optional SDK Update with Consent Support
Publishers take note: As part of our support for GDPR, we are releasing version 11.12.2 of our SDK. This optional release supports publishers who wish to pass consent/non-consent flags for all Tapjoy products, including offerwall and video, and has been designed for compatibility with mediation partner specifications available as of the date of release. Technical guidance for integration of this update is here.

What Hasn’t Changed: Prioritizing User Privacy
We’ve always valued user privacy, and our system is built to protect it. We track and reward mobile user ad engagement using pseudonymous data points (specifically, device advertising identifier and IP address). We use what we learn within our proprietary system to provide ad offers tailored to audience interests as part of our mobile advertising and publisher monetization offerings. We don’t trade, buy, sell, or share data with unrelated third parties. We respect opt-outs and honor data subject privacy rights.

The updates to our terms and the new DPA go into effect, like the GDPR itself, on May 25, 2018; your continued use of Tapjoy after that date means that you accept the terms as updated. If you have any questions about the updates or our other GDPR compliance steps, email us at gdpr_questions@tapjoy.com.

GDPR Talked, Tapjoy Listened! was originally published in Tapjoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Please tell us a little about yourself and your role at Tapjoy.
My name’s Mike Lisavich and I’m the head of demand products at Tapjoy, which basically means I oversee all the work we do on ad products, videos, and digital creatives. My team is mostly developers, and we spend a lot of time trying to solve problems that publishers and advertisers deal with when trying to reach users at scale. We also build Tapjoy’s dashboards and reporting APIs, and we maintain the integrations we have with mobile measurement partners. We’re fairly autonomous, which means we get to tackle some very interesting challenges. Right now we’re heads-down on things like goal-based bidding and playable end cards for games and brands.

Can you please describe your thoughts on the current challenges and opportunities ad-tech/mar-tech companies face regarding the role of machine learning?
I’d say the biggest challenge people face is finding the right balance of machine learning versus traditional optimization. We actually have a pretty significant head start there. Tapjoy’s algorithms for our video and offerwall products have been driven by machine learning for years. We invested early and it’s paid off big time by keeping our buying processes efficient, saving us manpower, and letting us gain insights that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. Those are the same opportunities I think a lot of folks are trying to realize. Where it starts to get particularly challenging, and what we’re particularly excited for, is when advertisers push for goal-based deals in machine learning-powered products. Those sorts of downstream models make bidding and optimization particularly challenging, but we’re already exploring this with some help from our data science team, and it’s going well.

What’s the biggest challenge in developing an AI-based system for bid rate optimization and targeting?
There are two main challenges, and the first is privacy-related. Any sort of data science — AI-based or otherwise — is only as effective as the data it has access to. Data privacy legislation like the GDPR puts hard limits on that. The mandate then becomes “do more with less,” but once certain data points are off-limits, there’s only so much you can do. Having to triage optimization and targeting tasks based on fundamental data availability makes predicting efficacy far more difficult. Don’t get me wrong, privacy is important and I’m glad the discussion is being had, but a lot of the surrounding nuance hasn’t yet reached the public consciousness. My hope is that privacy and innovation are able to find a balance that allows for the best of both worlds, and that the proper security measures are taken. I really think there’s the potential for a win-win outcome.

The second biggest challenge I’d say is probably event-based targeting. There’s mounting interest from publishers, probably due to similar functionality available from companies like Facebook, for the ability to target users based on in-app behavior. The sheer volume of touch points across disparate systems can make for a pretty tangled process that only a few firms like us can unravel, but AI can help. It can be used to power things like behavioral analysis and psychographic profiling that have the potential to be huge time savers, while making advanced targeting strategies more widely available. There’s a lot of links in the chain that ultimately need to lead back to an advertiser, but AI is making that more and more approachable.

Do you think AI-enabled computers will one day take over the media buying process completely?
I doubt anybody will be comfortable handing over the reins entirely, so there’s always going to be some sort of human element, but the industry is definitely trending towards programmatic practices that go layers deep. Advertisers are accustomed to buying users based on variables like device model, country and publisher app, and that’s only possible in the programmatic world. It’s also what allows us to optimize extremely well within our own network, but we have to consider the fact that some of our advertisers want us to be efficient against other networks as well. We’ve learned to always focus on our customer and the problem they’re trying so solve, and that will always require some level of human involvement.

How does ad creative factor into it? What role does creative play in deciding the outcome of a bid? How can that be optimized programmatically?
Creative will always play a huge role. No matter how powerful the technology gets, all it can do is find the right audience. Creative closes the deal. That said, we’re cooking up a lot of fun new technology that allows creatives to explore new vectors of approach. Things like interactive end cards and playable ads have the market excited, especially among certain mobile gaming genres. They seem to be an especially great fit for games with clear, concise, intuitive mechanics because those are the ones that are producing some of the highest performance numbers we’ve ever seen. We’re still having a lot of fun fine-tuning the balance between content and these new mediums, and machine learning has been a big part of that. It allows us to quickly discover what works for which types of users, and how to prioritize different data sets when setting up optimization.

What can advertisers do to make their bidding more effective?
I think just investing the time in really getting to know your product. When advertisers know which metrics are most closely correlated with value, say 7-day retention for example, they can really zero-in on who it is they want to reach without wasting resources on reaching the wrong audiences.

What insights and data are most important to advertisers today, and what ad products solve for this?
Most advertisers are primarily interested in a clearly illustrated path down the funnel, all the way to positive ROI. Years ago this would have required us to rewrite reporting APIs, and data wasn’t as free-flowing, but industry attitudes have thankfully changed for the better. They’re also really interested in data transparency for comparison purposes. Most mature advertisers are operating across multiple networks, and they want to be able to see how we stack up, which is completely understandable. We’re also hearing a fair bit of demand for self service tools that allow them to change bids and see where their impressions are coming from. As far as the products that enable that, there are a few popping up, but we’re in the middle of building out a whole new ad reporting API that’ll include a lot more detail on things like that.

Video advertising is a bit of a commodity within the mobile marketplace. What is your team doing to make Tapjoy’s video offering and ad creative stand out?
Anyone can deliver impressions. Installs tailored to in-app goals, on the other hand, are a much bigger ask, and it’s there that we’re focussing the bulk of our efforts. Our investments in data science, machine learning and innovative formats allow us to deliver users that are much more likely to take specific actions. It’s the specialized caliber of install that makes us stand out.

Before Tapjoy, you co-founded a mobile app that connected people through common friends. (The business, Rekindle, was sold to HubSpot in 2015.) What did you learn during your experience there that helps you in your role at Tapjoy?
Startups teach you to be scrappy. When you’re on a small team, and you’re looking at the ends of very real financial runways, it creates a sense of urgency that you just can’t fake, especially as a founder. It forced us to chase faster, make smarter moves, and always keep the customer in mind. All of those values have found a place in the Tapjoy culture, in one form or another. Internally, we have this design standard called “Minimum Lovable Products” where it’s not just enough for a product or feature to satisfy a customer — it has to delight them. It’s that emotional reaction that we’re always looking for, even if it’s just from a prototype. Having a tight customer feedback loop is the only way to be successful, which is why we’re always working to solve problems in partnership with our customers. Anything else is a waste of time and money.

And now for the really important question. We hear you’re a fan of social casino apps, so what’s your favorite casino game?
On my mobile device, I’ve been enjoying a bunch of premium poker games, but if I’m actually in a casino, nothing beats a bunch of friends crowded around a craps table.

Tapjoy Mobile Champions: Mike Lisavich of Tapjoy was originally published in Tapjoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We take privacy very seriously and we support consumers’ rights to control their personal data. As such, we believe that GDPR is an important step for the entire digital ecosystem, and we want to help all of our advertising and developer partners make sure they’re in compliance with GDPR requirements as well.

We are accepting the role of “controller” status with respect to personal data passed to us through our SDK for monetization purposes and “processor” status for personal data provided to us by advertisers and publishers for other purposes. We will be updating our Privacy Policy as well as our Terms & Conditions to provide additional transparency and clarity, and we are completing self-certification to Privacy Shield.

Privacy, trust, and consumer empowerment are among Tapjoy’s core values. If you have any questions regarding GDPR or what you need to do to comply, please contact us at gdpr_questions@tapjoy.com.

What You Need to Know About Tapjoy & GDPR was originally published in Tapjoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mother’s Day is right around the corner, and if you’re planning to give Mom some flowers and candy, you might want to think again. It turns out, what she really wants is some time alone to play her favorite mobile game.

Tapjoy’s latest consumer survey found that moms are big-time mobile gamers, spending more time playing games than dads and non-parents do. The average mobile gaming mom spends over an hour per day playing games on her smartphone or tablet, while nearly a quarter of them (24%) play for more than three hours a day. They’re playing very frequently as well, with more than a third (35%) saying they play at least six times a day.

Mobile games are a great stress reliever for moms, with more than half (51%) citing that they play games to unwind from a stressful day. Other top reasons they cited include having fun (43%), being challenged (33%) or entertained (32%), and simply killing time (33%). For most moms, gaming is a solo activity, as only 11% said they do it in order to play a game with their friends (compared to 14% of dads).

We all know that moms are extremely busy, so when are they finding all this time to play games? Of course, we also know that they are extremely good at multitasking. Many of them play while watching TV (58%), while at work (14%), or even while with their children (21%). It’s also a nice chance for them to unwind right before going to sleep at night (45%) or while relaxing at home (50%).

Puzzle games are, by far, the preferred type of games moms like to play, with 51% saying that such games are among their favorites. Trivia games are the next most popular, at 29%, followed by Strategy games (28%), Casino or Card games (25%), and Adventure games (16%).

If you’re an advertiser trying to reach the moms market, mobile games are a great way to do so. More than three-quarters of moms in our survey (77%) said that they handle the majority of shopping for things like groceries and housewares for their household, and two-thirds (66%) say they shop at least twice per week. They also happen to be an ethnically diverse group, while many hold higher education degrees.

So if you’re planning a Mother’s Day promotion, contact your Tapjoy sales rep to ask how we can help connect you with this lucrative and highly engaged audience through mobile games.

And if you’re wondering what to get your own mom for the occasion, we hear the Razer Phone and the iPhone X provide great gaming experiences.

The Best Way to Reach Moms for Mother’s Day Promotion? Try Mobile Games. was originally published in Tapjoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rewarded ads have become a significant source of revenue for many of the top grossing app developers today. But most developers don’t know that the ads, also known as “value exchange” ads, also help increase their in-app spend, app engagement and user retention metrics as well.

If players can get virtual currency or premium in-app items simply for watching videos or engaging with ads, they are likely to have a better, richer app experience, which leads to more usage. And once they get the taste for an app’s virtual economy, they are likely to want more, which means rewarded ads often serve as gateway to in-app payments.

All of this was quantified in our latest Maximum Impact Report: “Exploring the Effect of Rewarded Ads on User Value.” We wanted to know whether users become more (or less) valuable to app publishers as they complete more ads, and by how much. To find the answers, we looked at millions of users across ten high-volume apps and measured their average performance for in-app spend, user sessions and 30-day retention depending on how many rewarded ads they completed.

We found that the more rewarded ads a user engages in during their first two weeks with an app, the higher their other KPI’s soar. As detailed in parts 1 and 2 of this blog series, users who complete 20 or more rewarded ads demonstrated 89 percent higher engagement and an incredible 705 percent higher in-app spend than users who complete just five or fewer ads.

Now let’s take a look at how rewarded ads impact user retention.

Our data shows that users who watched up to five videos in their first week had a 30-day retention rate of 35%. That’s nearly 3 times better than the industry average of 13%. The average retention rate spikes for users who complete 6–10 rewarded ads during their first two weeks — up to 49%! And it continues to climb even higher with each additional ad a user completes, at a rate of 16% between each new cohort group.

The most voracious consumers of rewarded ads — those who watched 20 or more videos in their first two weeks — wound up with a remarkable 30-day retention rate of 62%, or nearly 5 times higher than industry benchmarks.

Such high correlation is proof that rewarded ads improve the user experience for mobile apps. Players who watch rewarded videos use the virtual currency or premium items that they earn to have a richer, more, well, rewarding time, and as a result they end up using the app for longer periods.

Best practices to maximize ad engagement

The main thing app developers should take from our report is that rewarded ads drive a lot more than just ad-based revenue: they also drive IAP revenue, engagement and retention. It is therefore important to expose users to ads early and often. Our new Maximum Impact Report provides more details on eight suggested best practices to maximize rewarded ad engagement, so be sure download the full report for more!

Part 3 of 3: Rewarded Ads Can Increase User Retention by 76% or More was originally published in Tapjoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In case you missed our latest Maximum Impact Report, the data shows that rewarded videos bring a whole lot more value to mobile apps beyond the direct revenue they generate. There’s the profound impact on in-app spend, which, as we detailed in part one of our blog series, increases by as much as 8x for users who watch a lot of rewarded videos. And then there’s the impact on retention, which we’ll describe in a future blog post. But for now, let’s examine the effect rewarded ads have on user sessions and overall engagement.

To quickly recap, our Maximum Impact Report examines the question, “Do users become more (or less) valuable to app publishers as they complete more ads?” To find the answers, we looked at millions of users across ten high-volume apps. After first cohorting users based on the number of rewarded ads they completed during their initial two weeks, we then measured their average performance for in-app spend, user sessions and 30-day retention during the following 30 days.

Just as with the other two metrics, we found that the more rewarded advertisements a mobile app user completes, the higher their engagement metrics climb.

Rewarded Ads and User Sessions

According to our data, users who watched five rewarded videos or less came back for an average of 13 app sessions over the next 30 days — an average of nearly one session for every two days. That’s not bad, but the sessions go up 46 percent when users move into the next cohort and watch between six and ten rewarded videos. The number of sessions goes up again with the next cohort, and in fact with every cohort group we studied, indicating a strong correlation between the number of rewarded videos a user watches and the number of app sessions they participate in. The average increase across all cohort groups was 18 percent.

The highest group of ad consumers, those who watched 20 or more videos in their first two weeks, wound up conducting an average of 24 sessions over the next 30 days. That’s nearly double as many as those who only watched 0–5 video ads!

The reason for such a high correlation is likely a matter of causation. Players who watch rewarded videos gain currency to spend or premium items to use in their favorite apps. They are then more likely to come back and open those apps in order to spend the currency or use the premium items they earned. The currency and items then lead to a better, more exciting user experience, which in turn leads them to come back again, and so on in a virtuous cycle.

Best Practices to Maximize Ad Engagement

To drive higher user engagement, it is important to expose users to ads early and often. Our new Maximum Impact Report provides more details on eight suggested best practices to maximize rewarded ad engagement, so be sure download the full report for more!

Part 2 of 3: Rewarded Ads Can Boost User Sessions By 89% or More was originally published in Tapjoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week, Tapjoy launched a new Maximum Impact Report, focusing on the effect of rewarded ads on user value. The report is the first of its kind on the relationship between the number of completed rewarded ads and specific metrics like in-app spend, engagement and retention.

Rewarded advertisements allow users to earn in-app currency or unlock content in exchange for engaging with advertising content. The report covers a detailed analysis of ten high-volume apps and revealed some insightful findings. For instance, users who complete 20 or more rewarded ads demonstrate 89 percent higher engagement, 76 percent higher retention, and an incredible 705 percent higher in-app spend than users who complete just five or less ads.

As Pocketgamer pointed out, users who complete 6–10 ads in their first two weeks spend almost three times as much on in-app purchases ($1.23) than those who complete 0–5 ads ($0.43). In light of the results and launch of the report, MarTechSeries featured Ben Chen, SVP & GM of Developer Relations at Tapjoy, saying “These findings negate the notion that ads take away from the user experience or distract the user from engaging with the app, or that rewarded ads may cannibalize in-app purchases. Rather, it shows just how important it is to expose users to ads early and them offer frequent opportunities to convert.”

For more details on the Maximum Impact Report: Exploring the Effect of Rewarded Ads on User Value, check out additional coverage in MobyAffiliates, AppDeveloper Magazine, BizReport, adotas and AdTechDaily.

Publishers Uncover the True Value in Users Who Complete More Rewarded Ads was originally published in Tapjoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.