What is Display Rate and how does it affect the revenue of your application?

Rewarded Video or viewing video ads for a fee have become a full-fledged part of the monetization strategy for mobile applications. No one doubts the effectiveness of this ad format - Soomla reports that rewarded videos increase revenue by 20-40%, and Facebook announced the connection to Rewarded Video on Facebook Audience Network. However, working with Rewarded Video is not always as easy as it sounds.


When using Rewarded Video in an application, you need to pay attention to the Display Rate - this is a metric that displays the ratio of the displayed advertising to the loaded. Display Rate values ​​differ for each advertising format: about 90% for small banners and 60-70% for Static Interstitial (“intermediate” full-screen banners), according to Appodeal .

In the case of Rewarded Video and Video Interstitial (full-screen video between the application screens), sad numbers appear in the statistics - 10-20%, or even 1-5%. This means that out of 1000 downloaded videos only 100 were shown. This situation does not benefit anyone: neither the advertising network that provided the advertisement, nor the developer, since the advertisement remains unworked and unpaid. In other words, the income from it will not wait.
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Low Display Rate and, as a result, revenue loss is the result of ill-conceived video advertising downloads. The golden rule of working with Rewarded Video: do not upload a video if you know that you cannot show it yet - and in many cases you can find out in advance.

Many developers download the video immediately when starting a new session of the application, along with other formats. For example, if the auto-cache option is enabled (automatic caching), the video is loaded at startup, along with banners and full-screen advertising, and waits for its hour. This process is an additional load on ad network servers. Networks receive unearned advertising and because of this can not assess the real potential of the application. The application loads ads much more than it can show - of course, this leads to a poor Display Rate and reduces the developer's income.

Consider the first example in which a video is loaded too early. Suppose after the fifth level in your game, the user is asked to open the reward box. In order to receive this reward immediately after the fifth level, the player can watch Rewarded Video. If the user does not want to watch the video, then he can open this very little box, say, only in two hours. Most likely, the user will want to watch the video - then the downloaded (prepared in advance) video is really useful.
However, to reach the fifth level, the user may need several gaming sessions — for example, ten. All ten times that the user enters the application, but does not reach the fifth level, the video ad loads again due to automatic caching and goes into oblivion not shown.



Now consider a more elaborate scheme for working with Rewarded Video in the same application. Suppose that we divide users into two groups: those who will most likely watch the video and those who have not yet reached the moment of the show.
In the game discussed above, you should not download a video in advance for a user who is playing at the third level. This player can run the application several more times before reaching level five with Rewarded Video and the proposed reward. As soon as the user approaches the event of handing the chest - for example, the fourth level - you can prepare a video for the show. The probability that it will be viewed is much higher. In this case, we disable the auto cache for Rewarded Video, focus on the course of the game, and proceed to manual caching for Rewarded Video. We postpone the moment of loading (preparation) of the video to the fourth level event. Thus, the video is loaded in advance, but not too early.
It turns out that the best, albeit the most obvious way to avoid trouble is to work with the audience and analyze its behavior in the application.



Of course, the gameplay may not imply a clear plan for the distribution of chests, and the chests themselves may not be in the game. For example, for rewarded video you can get in-game currency. In this case, you should focus on the statistics of the application and track when users go to the game store. Perhaps, according to statistics, it will be seen that in the first 3-5 minutes, players try different characters or solve simple puzzles. In these first minutes of the game, an in-game store may not be interested. Also, according to statistics, you can find that no one opens the Rewarded Video earlier than after 4 minutes - then it makes no sense to prepare the video from the very beginning, but it is worth starting to load it 3 minutes after the start of the game.

We looked at a few common examples of dealing with a low Display Rate due to the thoughtful download of rewarded video. Of course, there are many possible strategies depending on the genre and audience of the application. Study your users, look at the application through their eyes, and everything will be fine.



In addition, there are many ways to increase the Display Rate, encouraging players to watch videos for a reward. This will help pop-up notifications: they will report the ending currency, the end of the level, the need to update the hero and so on. Notifications should be as transparent as possible - the user wants to clearly understand what reward he will receive for viewing, and why it will be useful to him.

Despite these nuances, Rewarded Video is a clear trend in advertising monetization, and it is only gaining momentum. Users are loyal to watching videos for a fee - such advertising annoys them much less, so experiment and analyze the results.
work with this format.

How to make your users watch your ad, read our previous post .