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!

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

More and more developers are starting to integrate interstitial ad placements into their apps… between turns, after the end of a game, or even after a certain number of uses. If you’re thinking about using interstitials, you need to know about the interstitial precaching functionality in our SDK.

In order to decide which ad to serve when, our ad server uses the tiers and weights assigned to ads as in relation to each other in addition to any targets and limits assigned to each ad specifically. The ad server then sends the client an ordered list of ads to display. This list is ordered as follows:

1. The ad server determines whether an ad is eligible to serve based on the targets and limits assigned to that ad. For example, if an ad is geo-targeted to be US only, it is ineligible to serve to a user in Canada. Likewise, an ad set to serve only on weekdays between 11 am and 4 pm Pacific is ineligible to serve on a Saturday.
2. Ads that are eligible to serve are grouped by tiers by ascending tier number. That means that all ads in Tier 1 must fail to load before the SDK will attempt to load an ad in Tier 2.
3. Ads within a tier are sorted based on their weights using a pseudorandom number generator. For example, consider the case of having two ads in a tier. Ad A has a weight of 100 while ad B has a weight of 50. Ad A will be the first to be attempted to load 66% of the time (100 / 150) while ad B will be the first in line 33% of the time (50 / 150).

Once this ordered list of ads is constructed, our ad server looks to see if any ads will always load (i.e. they are not third-party SDK ads. House ads and server-side feed ads always serve). If our ad server finds these, it truncates the ordered list sent to the client at the first occurrence of one of these ads.

It’s important to note that our SDK requests ads from partners only when ads are needed.  We do not keep requesting ads from ad networks/exchanges in the background or request ads from partners unless the ads requested are to be shown to a user. This ensures that your CTR is not artificially lowered by requesting ads that are not going to be seen by a user.

Interstitial ads are full-screen ads shown to users at natural breaking points in an app’s flow. These full-screen ads allow an advertiser’s message to be delivered more strongly and directly to users in comparison to standard banner ads, resulting in higher eCPMs.

In our experience, interstitial ads command 2-5x higher click thru rates versus standard banner ads in the same app. Since many mobile ads are sold on a cost-per-click – CPC – basis (that is, you get paid per click), that means that each interstitial ad you show generates 2-5x more revenue than each banner ad you show. Also, some interstitial ads, especially video ads, are sold on a CPM basis (you get paid each time you show an ad, regardless of whether the user clicks on the ad). This means that you get paid for each and every ad you show – unlike cost per click ads.

Our developer partners have seen great results in monetizing their apps using a combination of both interstitial and banner ads. We recommend that developers include interstitial ads in their apps whenever possible. Since interstitial ads take over the entire app screen, we recommend interstitials be placed at natural breaking points in the app’s flow, for example at app launch or between levels or turns in a game.