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[Il HWAN] Hi, everyone. Welcome to our Unite Now session
that is part of the Indie XP series called
The Game Within the Game: Ad Monetization and Game Design.
My name is Il Hwan Lee, Client Partner supporting
ad monetization partnerships with developers in the Unity Ads team.
Today, we will be touching on one of the very beginning topics
around monetization for free-to-play games.
In particular, we will go a bit further into ad monetization.
Today, we have Jamar Graham who has recently joined us
as Partner Manager on the Publisher Operations team here at Unity.
Thanks, Il Hwan, I am super excited to talk about this.
Recently, I've worked at bigger companies,
Scopely and Disney, but before then, for pretty much a decade,
I worked at small indie companies so I definitely understand
the struggles there and when I worked there,
I really loved these sort of conversations
so I'm very excited to get into this topic.
Alright, awesome. Thank you for joining us.
And really what we want to cover today
is when we get into calls with a lot of developers and publishers
who are just getting started on monetization,
they ask a lot of similar questions.
Some of the questions that we put together here is,
what are some of the things that they need to consider
when they get started on ad monetization,
and what are some of the effective ways to implement different types
of ad unit designs and ad formats?
And following that, we have a lot of questions that are asking,
"Are there any basic strategies on maximizing ad revenue?"
And lastly, they ask,
"What are some of the measurements of success and how do they know
if they are successfully rolling out some of these designs?"
Hopefully, we can cover a lot of this topic today with you, Jamar.
And getting started, I wanted to ask you,
what are some of the things that developers should consider
when they first think about monetization designs?
Yeah. Thank you so much.
When I advise teams on putting monetization into their games,
specifically ad monetization,
I often try to get the teams
to think about it during the game design process.
That's because you really want the ad monetization
to feel like it works with the game.
When the designer and the team is creating
that game design core loop, that's a great time to start
at least thinking and having conversations about how you want
to monetize the game, and how should that feel
as part of the design loop that the user will be going through.
When you're trying to think about what your economy looks like,
what your monetization is, it's really a discovery process
in the same way when you're trying to just find the fun
and find that loop that's very satisfying for the players.
You want to give it that time so that you can discover
the best monetization for your game.
Honestly, what I'm trying to avoid
is having people put it in really at the end
because it just feels tacked on.
The player's playing it, they're having a fun time,
and then suddenly, they just have this monetization
that pops in their face, and it doesn't feel as part of the flow
that they were in. It's just not really satisfying.
I want people to think about it earlier
so that it doesn't feel tacked on.
Jamar, you just mentioned things like core loop
and structuring the core loop
and balancing the economy, and whatnot.
But can we go a bit deeper here and provide a bit more specifics
on what the best designs for ad monetizations might be?
Yeah.
Really, I think about kind of the ad unit.
Am I doing a rewarded ad? Am I doing a non-rewarded ad?
From there, I look at the game design
and see where it fits in the best.
If I'm doing a rewarded ad,
I often think about, "Okay, well, in this core loop,
when am I going to reward the player?"
Very common for free-to-play games,
a player does some goal and then they'll get a reward.
That's a great place to put a rewarded ad.
It makes sense at that point
because players are expecting to get rewards and the ad is just
a supplement to the existing game design.
Players often very much relish
getting an additional reward for their accomplishments.
If I'm doing a non-rewarded ad, some sort of interstitial video
or a static display, I'm thinking about me as a player,
"When do I want a break? When have I just done something
that was super difficult or time-consuming?"
At that point, I kind of want to take a second and think about
my next strategy and what I want to do,
it's a great time to put in an interstitial ad.
It kind of serves as a commercial break in television
where it gives you time to breathe, process what happened before
and then continue on with your gameplay.
You just mentioned some interesting keywords here
of rewarded versus non-rewarded,
and it seems like there are different kinds of ad formats
that are available for your use.
Can we take a step back and just go over
the different kinds of ad formats that are involved here?
Yeah, I think that's kind of confusing.
Usually when I'm talking about ad formats,
I'm really thinking of it from a design perspective.
From that perspective, I think of interstitials,
which is sort of you're playing the game and an ad pops up,
it could be a static interstitial, it could be a video interstitial,
design-wise it doesn't really matter.
You still want to have it in a nice break area.
You might want to put in a banner. A banner is always on the screen,
usually found at the top or bottom of the screen,
and you just want to make sure that your UI is designed
so that it's out of the way for important information,
but it can still be seen.
And finally, again, as I said about rewarded ad,
you want the user to do something to get a reward.
The actual format may be a video, it may be a playable
where they get to play a little bit of the game they're looking at,
I've seen AR,
I've seen some really cool, fun creatives that are there,
but on a design perspective,
they all fall into that bucket of rewarded video.
Okay. You mentioned that there's different kinds of ad formats
that you can utilize. Of course, within the realm of the game design
there is the interstitial, the banners,
which are static displays and then you have the rewarded designs.
But some of our publishers ask,
"What are some of the better... Are there any better correlation
between a best-case usage of specific ad formats
to a specific game genre?"
Yeah, absolutely.
When you're looking at your game, you kind of have to consider
what the genre is and not just the genre,
but a bit of how did you design your economy,
what is the game experience you want. And then there's
some best practices around that.
For example, say, you designed a hyper-casual game,
you're expecting the players to have very short sessions
where they're playing something for a minute or two,
you don't expect players to play it for months on end,
there's very little economy, that's a great place to put a banner.
You want to make sure that it's when the user is in the game,
that they can see the ad, that it's relatively frequent,
and banner is good for that.
If you have a game that's a bit more complex,
so a traditional modern casual game,
you often are going to have some economy put with it.
If you have a light economy there,
banner may not make sense as you want players to play the game
a little bit longer, you want them to engage with your IAP
if that's in the game, so for that
you might want to consider an interstitial.
Because the game is longer and you're playing
for more intense sessions, players will want that break.
Interstitials are going to fit really well there.
And finally, say that you're really gung-ho
and you're making a mid-core game, you will have a lot of economy,
there's a lot of things the players can do,
you expect them to play this game for years,
that is a great place to put rewarded video
because you're going to have a lot of different rewards
that you can give them so everyone's going to feel
that that reward is valuable, you're going to have a lot of tools
that you can use so that you can modify the reward so it makes sense
to overall economy.
It's going to be something that players enjoy doing
so they're going to keep playing your game.
Awesome, so depending on how the players are engaging with the game,
and as you mentioned, things like game economy,
user progression, and the designs and the core loops behind that,
seems like specific ad formats might work better in that game.
Now, let's say that you actually came up with this full design
and you have it now implemented with your dev team,
I know that it's usually not an easy ask
to start implementing all these ads SDKs for ad monetization.
So the question that I also often get is,
"How much development effort is involved
in implementing these pieces as well as
what are some of the additional strategies to think about
that kind of comes along hand in hand
when you're implementing these SDKs?
Absolutely. This is definitely the indie problem
of not enough manpower for things.
Really, there's a couple of things you want to think about.
If you're a smaller developer or publisher,
you don't have a lot of resources, I would strongly recommend
doing research and just picking one ad network.
One, it's going to be easier to implement the SDKs
if you're only using one are relatively quick to put in,
shouldn't take more than one sprint cycle to put in.
You're not going to have a lot of maintenance
because you just need to upgrade that one SDK,
and if that one partner can fill all of your impressions,
that's great, it's going to be easy for you to put it in,
easy for you to test and start monetizing.
Also, if you're a bigger company, because I've worked with those too
and turns out you never have resources for that as well.
First time you're putting in ads, also think about,
"Hey, this might make sense just to do the one ad network."
Make sure it's working, get it really well tested
before trying to get more complex.
But I've worked with companies that had the manpower,
they had the expertise, at that point, multiple ad networks
with the ad mediator, makes the most amount of sense.
Yes, there's a trade-off where you need to make sure
you keep up to date with all of these SDKs,
that you make sure that everything is working correctly
between the ad networks and the ad mediator.
But at the end of the day, your ad networks
are competing against each other.
You're going to have these ad networks just fighting
and spinning as much money as possible so that
they can give you money for your valuable impressions.
Your eCPM, your average revenue per impression
is going to just increase with these multiple ad networks.
If you're a good team that's able to take care
of that challenge, I highly recommend multiple ad networks
with an ad mediator.
Now, you have the core loop set,
you have the designs for these ad units set,
of course, on top of that, you have the whole monetization piece,
and then, now, you've selected specific types of ad formats
that you're going to use, and now, you have selected,
you're either going to monetize with a single ad partner
or use mediation to allow different ad networks
to compete for that impression.
Now, you're ready to go live,
and this is the next confusing piece
for a lot of our developers.
They ask us, "How do you determine what is successful?"
"What are some of the core KPI metrics that you're looking at
or focused on to determine
whether or not you're in the right direction?"
Yeah, wish I could tell you your job is done, but really,
data is going to be something that you're going to look at
as soon as you get your ad network live.
The number one thing you want to look at: end-of-the-day revenue.
"Am I making money? Am I getting my return for this investment
into monetization that I put into my game?"
But that can be broken down in multiple ways.
One way to break it down
is effective cost per thousand impressions,
it's that eCPM I referred to earlier.
You want to make sure those impressions that you're giving out,
you're making money efficiently on them
and you want to increase that number so you can make
as much money as possible per impression that you give out.
Another thing that I personally very much advocate
is looking at funnels.
Just looking top-down, where are the best ways for me
to optimize to make more money?
When I talk about funnels, I'm thinking of two different funnels.
One is my demand funnel. To break it down kind of simply,
I'm looking at the amount of requests that I send out
to the ad network or ad mediator,
and I look at how many of those requests
get filled by the ad network
and I have an impression that I can show to a user.
I'm looking at the percentage there
and I try to get that percentage as high as possible.
On the supply side, I look at the supply funnel,
and that I start off with the daily average users, your DAU.
How many users are in your game
and are these users engaging with ads?
If it's a rewarded ad unit, are they going to where
the rewarded ad button is?
Are they tapping on the rewarded ad button?
That's very important metrics.
You also want to look into interstitial.
Are they supposed to be seeing interstitials?
Are they actually seeing interstitials?
Those are things you want to look at
and you want to see if there's any technical problems going on
or if there's any ways to gently guide your users
to where you want them to go for the monetization.
And end of the day, retention, retention, retention.
You definitely want your users to stay in your game
and you want to make sure that they appreciate
the ad monetization that's in there
and that it feels part of the process.
Definitely look to make sure your users are not churning,
they're staying in your game, and that they feel
that the ad monetization is part of the game process.
Yeah, when you start moving into the realm of collecting data
and analyzing them, it seems like there's a whole new world
in live operations.
But let's say that, for some of our viewers who are running
an extremely lean team, maybe you might be
a one-man development/ publishing team.
What are some of the key metrics here that you would recommend
to just focus on in the beginning?
Again, as a person who's been the lone person looking at data,
sometimes you just need to look at the very high-level metrics.
If I had to pick and choose, look at average revenue per user,
how much money am I making per person,
that's going to be a great gauge of how effective you are.
Also, look at your retention.
I personally enjoy looking at D7 of players who install:
are they coming back on the seventh day?
That's a good way of seeing if people are coming back to your game
and enjoying the experience. If I had to choose just a couple
to look at, definitely ARPU, definitely retention.
It seems like depending on the game genre,
and also the designs of the game, seems like some of the priorities
on these data metrics seem to be shuffled around a little bit.
Exactly. Yeah. It really depends on
what makes the most sense for your game,
so you definitely have to have a discussion and make sure
that you're looking at the metrics that really move the needle.
Awesome. It looks like we're almost at time here, Jamar,
but if you were to summarize some of the points
to reiterate to our viewers today, could you outline
some of the points that you discussed and share?
Yes. As a summary, here's the things
I want people to take away from this talk.
Number one, try to put in that design
and your monetization choices
as close to the game design process as possible.
Don't wait to the very end and assume you can just stick it in
because a good ad monetization design happens
when it works in marriage with the core loop.
Definitely try to think about it, even if it's not 100% done,
think about it as early as possible.
Number two, when you're thinking about it,
definitely consider the ad formats that you want to use.
Obviously, the easiest way is just think about your game genre.
What are the standards there?
Using a hyper-casual? Go ahead and put banner and interstitial.
If you're doing a mid-core game, you might want to just concentrate
on rewarded video. Also, on concentrate,
know how much time you want to put into implementing these ads SDKs.
If you know you don't have a lot of time,
you know you don't have a lot of resources,
or you just want to test, consider putting in just one ad network
and not going with an ad mediator.
But if you're able to take that challenge,
obviously, you can make a lot more money
with a lot of ad networks and ad mediators.
And finally, you're not going to get out of it,
you have to do some live ops, you'll have to look at some data.
Pick and choose metrics that make the most sense for your game
and that you're able to evaluate and keep on it, keep on testing,
and make sure that you're just optimizing your game
as much as possible. [Il HWAN] Awesome.
Thank you, Jamar, for sharing your valuable knowledge
from the industry. And thanks, everyone,
for attending this Unite Now session
on The Game Within the Game: Ad Monetization and Game Design.
We hope you've learned a lot today to apply some of this knowledge
to advance your projects. But be sure to check out
our Unite Now page right here,
that's labeled
for additional awesome sessions in the Indie XP series that dives
more into some of the topics that we covered today.
Today, we've covered just the basic grounds, really,
in a few minutes and there's a lot of science behind
not just monetization, game design, but also in the live ops space.
Please make sure to check out that site
and check out some of the other more in-depth sessions,
and also check out our newly launched program
called Game Growth where you can partner with Unity
to accelerate growth of your live existing mobile titles.
And lastly, feel free to post your questions on the forum
or let us know what you think.
We are exploring and gathering feedback from you guys
to know which topics that we want to cover more in-depth,
so feel free to just leave your comments on the forums.
And we are going to make sure that we will cover those items
down the line in our future sessions, so stay tuned.
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