Unless you’re making larger games, chances are you are monitising your apps with some sort of mobile ad network. I’ve used a lot of these over the past year, and its always worthwhile to keep a look out for new ad networks who are doing well. One such network I had been hearing good things about was Applovin. Applovin is an iOS and Android ad network. So I decided to try them out with 2 little iOS games I was publishing. First up I had a little racing game that went live on Fri 28 June, 3 days ago. Here are the stats.

The eCPM started off higher then settled just under $7, with total revenue of $141 from Applovin for the weekend. What’s very interesting and quite unusual, is you can actually track the fill rate and eCPM per country, which I haven’t seen too many times before in ad networks.

Some of the eCPMs are pretty nice… $78 in New Zealand, $9 in the US and $8 in Australia. So if you have apps with strong downloads in English speaking countries this is definitely worth looking at. CTRs are pretty good all round as you can see. China is a bit different… the fill rate is quite low (28%) and eCPMs are good at $9.99. Is it hard to compare this to other ad networks as you don’t really have access to their specific fill rates. Making money from ads in China is difficult. You could actually try to improve your ad revenue by using Applovin in association with a Chartboost campaign set up only to show in countries where Applovin has a low fill rate – which isn’t that many.

Next up I had another reskin going live this Saturday, so I had Applovin ads in here as well. Here’s the overview.

This game has been live for about 2.5 days and has made $251, with an overall eCPM of $7.13. That’s not bad. You can see this game is getting more downloads and ad impressions than the first game. Below is the breakdown of fill rates and eCPMs by countries.

China has a low fill rate again, but all of the other countries with large impressions have very high fill rates which is good. eCPMs are not bad either.. nearly $10 in the US, $20 in France (maybe I need to make some French apps?) and the app is doing well in other European countries with high impressions as well. Again for this one you could set up a Chartboost campaign for China only, and have both working together to try and increase this a little.

Their ads are a mixture of static pictures often with a moving button.

Of course figures in the online dashboard are all well and good, but there are a few other things to consider:

1. Customer service: These guys are good. Quick to reply, very helpful and nice to deal with.
2. Payment times: Applovin pay net 15. So you will get paid for your all your July sales by Aug 15th. This is both nice & unusual from what I’ve seen. Fast is good 
3. Payment thresholds: You can do paypal (min $20) or wire transfer (min $150). Paypal with a $20 minimum is pretty nice for new developers when every penny counts.
4. Full screen ads will make you more money than banner ads
5. Works on iOS and Android. I am going to try Applovin on a few Android apps soon, and have heard good things on the grapevine about this.
6. Applovin is also recommended to put into older apps which already have a larger user base, as it can lead to higher eCPMs. IF this is true it would be great. App downloads and impressions naturally decline after you move out of the new charts so having eCPMs increase as your app ages would be quite nice to offset the usual income drop.
7. Seeing the fill rates and impressions by country is pretty cool.
8. SDK integration is quite simple. Not only that, but when you sign up to Applovin you get ONE ID. You give your developer that one ID for EVERY APP. Unlike the other networks you do NOT need to make a new ID for each app, which is great. If you’ve doing a lot of apps this is BIG.

The only disadvantage I’ve seen to date is you cannot turn off ads in your dashboard. Once ads are on, they are on. Only an app update with Applovin removed can turn them off. Hopefully Applovin will change this in the future as this flexibility is really needed for publishers if you need to switch your app from paid to free for vice versa when its live. 7 days in review is a long time to wait.

So overall I’m pretty happy with Applovin so far and will be using it in more apps.

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