Beyond Banner Ads Part 4: Promoting IAPs to optimize for higher ROI

The final instalment from advisor Tiffany Keller in our series deep-dive series looks at how to harness player intentionality to serve the right message with higher ROI than an impression, with analysis on Spades Fever.

When you’ve solved for the Substitution Effect to your game’s relational Product Market Fit against its competitors, it makes sense to experiment with more advanced banner ad applications. Rather than simply serving a paid ad impression, banners can be hooked into the holistic in-game messaging system. And instead of adding more popups to your game flow to communicate every liveop, special offer, or new game launch, you can leverage your banner logic to show in-game messages that may be more valuable than the banner impression of a few cents. Branding and Cross Promoting with Banners.

Spades Fever can use  cross promotion to promote users to new games after a win moment

Spades Fever by Wildcard Games is a fast growing card game that is easily reskinnable in any of the suit games (ie Hearts) and has contributed to quickly growing Wildcard’s portfolio. This small team has embraced ad revenue in a truly hypercasual game that doesn’t contain an IAP store, so banners can fit several product marketing use cases for them. 

Banners can be used as in game messaging for cross promotion across your portfolio. The same way that showing a banner for ad revenue during a win moment can be more positively received by the user, a win moment is also the perfect association for a player to download one of your other games. Instead of creating a separate in-game popup, you can make use of real estate you already have by using an intrinsic in-game placement to decide between showing a banner ad or an in-game message like cross promotion. For publishers with games in a similar genre, it’s often believed you can cross promote up to 20% of your audience into retentive new titles! A successful cross promotion is a free CPI gained, which is often worth up to 30 paid banner impressions that could have been monetized! 

Banners Boosting IAP with Intentionality

For ad monetization only games like Spades Fever, IAPBoost™ banners can be the fastest way to offer any IAPs without making a store page or developing a complex in-game economy

If banners can be used to cross promote players across games in the portfolio, then why not use them to sell IAP? Spades Fever, a truly hypercasual IAA only game, can’t classically experiment with IAP unless they go through the effort of building an entire store page to enable IAPs first. In today’s privacy-first market landscape, many hypercasual apps are taking their first steps into hybrid monetization; starting with an IAPBoost™ placement from AdInMo could create a deep link to a purchase directly from the banner screen without needing to redirect to a store page. Gauging user interest in a booster to speed up point accumulation during a win moment like the mockup on the left would be a quick way to assess if building a full store page and IAP economy would be worth investment from Wildcard.

IAPBoost™ banners in Hexa Sort can be a fast way to offer bundles on boosters or show an ad impression depending on the placement configuration

Games like Hexa Sort covered in part 2 of this series call for a more advanced IAPBoost™ integration that accounts for purchase intentionality. Since they have already undertaken a huge effort to transform Lion Studios from hypercasual to hybridcasual by introducing an IAP pay-for power-progression, it’s important their ad design complements these systems rather than simply sit on top. 

In Hexa Sort you can buy boosters inside your level at the bottom of the screen, but this is only after you exhaust your current inventory. This gives you a bad deal of purchasing additional boosters one at a time, which works well in a pinch moment but still dissuades many hybrid casual purchasers from converting in that moment or converting before they run out with a better deal for multiple boosters. By integrating an IAPBoost™ placement in the top right hand corner that appears randomly, the players can be given a helpful bundle pricing on more boosters they can purchase in the level that convert value buyers. 

The best part is that this banner placement is flexible, and can be set to do anything from cross promotion, paid banner impressions, or other IAP offers because it sits outside the normal mediation toolsets on its own managed demand service. This means less integrations and more flexibility to serve the player the best message in the moment depending on the game goals.

For studios prioritizing level engagement, implementing a flexible banner to upsell or serve an impression on a screen with purchase intent can be the moderate path aligned with more even splits of IAP and IAA revenue

We aren’t done yet though- we still need to apply purchase intent. 

In Hexa Sort, many boards are able to be spun to multiple angles, different tile configurations, and highlight calming symmetry as key player motivation. This means an IAPBoost™ placement on a less busy screen that already signals purchase intent, like this “last chance” booster sale in the level, is a more streamlined UX with higher CVR lift. It has a weakness, however- this screen has a much smaller “top of funnel” due to its streamlined UX to preserve player level engagement. It would only be shown to a fraction of players in the level because most players would not click on booster purchase or run out of booster on any given level, so while we increase CVR lift from this screen we may not increase overall CVR as much as the first screen.

How do you decide which UX to go with? This is a great opportunity to AB test because we have a clearly defined hypothesis for understanding how important purchase intentionality is based on the winning result to this game’s audience for CVR and level engagement. I would also trying testing a mixed banner variant setup- showing the first screen with the IAPBoost™ ad directly on the level in the early game for the first 10 levels, which all have the same board tile configuration, could help monetize top of funnel DAU who are likely to churn out anyway. Then switching to this last chance sale IAPBoost™ screen after level 10 for players who stick with the game and thus highly value the symmetry flow states in gameplay could yield better results than sticking with just one message for all occasions. While sometimes simple is best, it’s important when altering your core mechanic experience to identify all possible risks and monetization levers for studios with a more advanced tooling setup.

Now we can see that banner monetization is much more than finding ideal real estate in your game UI menus, optimising your waterfall, and ceasing experimentation. We’re building a higher quality experience for players if banners are integrated into the way we operate all in game messaging. But wow does this answer our opening question from part 3: When am I done with banners in my game?

I follow a five step process in figuring out ROI on banner improvement and what are my best avenues to test or move on for good.

1. Do my banners account for less than 10% of my ad revenue?
2. Could my UX quality and frequency of banners be increased relative to direct competitors?
3. Is my banner demand optimized? Could I use more fill rate or demand providers?
4. Where do banners fit within my in-game messaging system? Can I use this real estate to market in game features or new games while cutting down on popups?
5. Have I connected my IAP and ad monetization streams with cross over products like IAPBoost™ or No  Ad IAPs?

Ad PMs can easily get mired in a predictable progression of integrating more ad units in more placements over the years to support growth in a live service game. How often do we revisit our core placements to update them with the advancements available to the industry each year? It’s become essential to collaborate with the core product teams to unite messaging systems across revenue and live ops stacks to show each player the right message or monetization lever at the right time. 

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