Lowdown: How to Optimize Mediation for your App Part 2

Lowdown is a weekly series that brings you tips and tricks on how to best use AdMob to grow your app business, directly from members of the Google AdMob team.

Optimizing your mediation setup will help you get the highest CPMs from the ad placements in your app. Last week, I covered how to use dynamic, real time competition (the Live CPM feature) to increase your chances of higher CPMs. If you haven’t done so, make sure to read through that article for a clear explanation of what mediation is and how to enable Live CPM. This week I’ll go over two more strategies that will further enhance your competitive setup. 

Regularly Update Your CPM Assignments

Make sure to update the CPM you assign for each of the ad networks in your mediation stack once every 10-14 days. Advertising network CPMs fluctuate over time. You want to be certain that the CPM you assigned for each network isn’t inaccurately high, causing you to settle for lower CPMs. Also, plan for your 10-14 day cycles to land on the first of every month, when advertiser’s usually reset their budgets. 

Segment Your Assigned CPM Values

To further intensify competition, segment your assigned CPM values based on geography. Impressions from different geographic locations can differ in value. Many developers will calculate a unique value for their most profitable regions and do a separate calculation for their Rest of World (ROW) inventory. 

To better understand how to segment by geography and increase the accuracy of your competitive setup, let’s use a real world app example. Imagine you’ve developed an app that’s very popular in Japan and in the US. When analyzing your mediation stack, it might be interesting to segment Japan and the US from the rest of the world and calculate the average CPM for each bucket. After doing so, you realized that one of your 3rd party advertising networks delivers $2 CPMs on average, but US and Japanese CPMs average $2.50 while the Rest of World CPM is $1.50. Instead of using the world average of $2.00, where AdMob would only need to beat $2.00 to serve a US and Japan impression, AdMob must now beat $2.50 to serve. Segmentation by geography brought precision to your competition, yielding potentially higher earnings. 

For more detailed instruction on mediation in AdMob, be sure to visit our Help Center. In the next edition of Lowdown, we’ll be looking at how you can begin to calculate the value of each user using Google Analytics. Until next time, be sure to stay connected on all things AdMob by following our Twitter page.