If you’re a developer with multiple apps, you’re probably using house ads to promote across titles. Most developers, however, are not clear on how much these cross-promotional house ads are actually worth. In turn, it is often difficult to decide which promotional combination will monetize with the best results. With Burstly’s download tracking feature, it’s easy to find out.

Download tracking is a feature that allows you to match clicks on an ad to an app install (meaning a user downloaded the app and opened it at least once). This allows you to determine the conversion rate for a particular ad and calculate the eCPM for the ad. An easy way to do this is to access Burstly’s website – it can calculate the eCPM for you automatically if you know your CPA (cost-per-action, equal to the “value” of a user for an app).

Here’s an example of why knowing your ads’ eCPM is so important:

Let’s say you’re running both third-party ad network ads and house ads in your app. You know that ad network A gives you a $1.00 eCPM and ad network B gives you a $2.00 eCPM, so it’s clear that you should run ad network B before you run ad network A to maximize your revenue, but what about your house ads? Where do they fit in? Using Burstly’s download tracking, you may discover that ads for another one of your apps result in one install per 1,000 ads shown. If this app is $0.99, then that gives you an eCPM of $0.70 and you should run house ads only if your ad networks can’t fill a request. If this app is $1.99, then you should run house ads instead of running ad network A since your eCPM is $1.40 versus ad network A’s $1.00 eCPM.

So, how do you get started with Burstly’s download tracking? If all of your apps run Burstly for ad serving, you’re ready to go. If not, just integrate our download tracking SDK (iOS only, download here) or integrate with our download tracking API. Once that’s done, just set up download tracking on each creative from its configuration page on our web UI. Check the download tracking box and enter the app’s bundle / package ID and the app’s CPA.

If you have any questions, we’re here to help. Just send us a note to support@burstly.com.

At Burstly our goal has always been to provide app developers with tools to maximize their revenue wherever that revenue comes from. Ad networks are a piece of that (albeit a very important one), but direct monetization of users through cross-promotion and in-app purchase can often times be more valuable. As a result, it’s important that developer’s have the flexibility and control to switch priorities based on their daily business needs. This message has resonated with our partners and we are thrilled to be leaders in ad mediation serving more than 10 billion monthly impressions.

With the rise of freemium games, we saw a huge need to offer the same set of tools to the incentivized space that we offer on mobile display. That’s why we are excited to announce the first product to mediate mobile offers on both iOS and Android: Burstly Rewards. Burstly Rewards enables you to take control of the offer space from every aspect. You can now mediate multiple providers within one wall, mix in house and direct campaigns, match the UI to your app’s look and feel for improved user experience, and support multiple offer types (videos, offers, downloads – android only, and shares). All with the same underlying targeting tools that power our display ad mediation.

Need to shut off a certain partner who is not in compliance with any announced changes? Do so on the fly and move inventory to new partners without an app re-submission. As new partners become available they can also be included without an SDK update (partner dependent).

Burstly is launching two products that can be used individually or simultaneously within the same app: Rewards Wall & Reward Page.

Rewards Wall

The Rewards Wall enables app developers to mix and match 3rd party networks, house, and directly sold offers in one wall. The developer can optimize by selecting which providers they want to display, along with the number of offers to display from each. Burstly also brings the power of their mobile mediation platform to Rewards, offering advanced geo-targeting, frequency rules, and optimization to Rewards.

Rewards Page

The Rewards Page allows you to run an attractive reward-driven campaign through a customizable branded environment that utilizes the entire screen. The user can access the Rewards Page through custom branded buttons and/or banners throughout the game. The goal of this product is to offer a simple, yet high impact engagement that allows an advertiser to receive several brand opportunities or enable the game to extend its brand further. The Rewards Page also taps into the Burstly ad server for ultimate flexibility and control.

The Burstly Rewards product is in beta starting today and developers can request to join. Check out the TechCrunch post as well.

Many developers we have talked to have expressed concern that their ad partner isn’t filling 100% of their ad inventory. In many cases, the number is abysmally low – sub 10%. Why is low fill such a concern? Any unfilled ad requests mean that impressions are going to waste as there’s no ad shown to a user at that moment. For example, a fill rate of 50% with an eCPM of $1 means that for each $1 your app makes, 1,000 impressions were wasted. These impressions could have been filled by another paying ad partner or used to promote your own apps and content.

Although no one ad provider can provide 100% fill alone, a partner like Burstly can ensure that all your inventory is used effectively without any impressions going to waste. How does Burstly do this? Burstly allows you to chain different ad providers (such as ad networks and ad exchanges) as well as providing you with ways to cross promote your own apps and content (using ads called house ads) and attaching a dollar value to those house ads. This is important because ad network / exchange ads may not always be the ads that would yield you the highest eCPM. (If you’re interested in learning more about house ads and how they can increase your eCPM, click here.)

On the ad network and ad exchange side, Burstly supports a variety of networks.  Server and client-side support includes AdMob, Millenial, Brightroll, Flurry, Greystripe, iAd, and many more. With an extensive array of partners available through Burstly integration we can help you figure out which perform the best on your app to maximize your revenue.

If you have any questions, just head over to http://support.burstly.com and let us know!

Now that the iOS 5 GM seed has been released to developers, we’re releasing our 1.27 SDK beta. This SDK version is compatible with iOS 5. We’re still waiting on confirmation from all of our ad network partners that their SDKs are fully iOS 5 compatible, but we’ve confirmed in our testing that the 1.27 SDK beta runs both Burstly and third party ad network server side partners successfully on the GM seed. If you’re a current Burstly publisher, go to https://github.com/burstly/Burstly-SDKs to download the 1.27 SDK beta today. 

Please note that if you are on an older version of the SDK its important to update to ensure forward compatibility. While we recommend you update your apps as soon as possible, an update will be coming in the next few weeks that includes expanded SDK support. Questions? Please let us know – we’re here to help! 

If you’re looking to increase your app’s ad revenue, you should consider adding interstitial ads to your app. Interstitial ads pay significantly more than banner ads eCPM wise and can also increase your app’s total ad impressions. On the flip side, interstitials are much more intrusive than banner ads and can negatively affect user experience (and thus decrease app usage) if not used with thought and care.

Interstitials are best displayed in natural breaking points of the app flow: before starting a new game, after a turn, before showing content to a user. Since the ad takes over the entire app screen, it’s important not to disrupt a user’s usage. For example, it would be extremely disruptive if a user were playing Pac-Man and an ad were displayed mid-game. Such implementations (including “auto-expanding banner ads”) can severely degrade user experience and app usage. A better implementation would be to show the user an ad after the user loses his last life, or even better, when the user passes a level (the ad here occurs after a positive event – winning – instead of after a negative event – dying).

Although interstitials are primarily seen in games, they can be introduced elegantly into other apps as well. For example, a news app may show an interstitial before an article is viewed, and a video app can show an interstitial before playing a video.

If you have any questions about interstitials and integrating them into your app, just reach out to us at support@burstly.com