As a social casino publisher, you have a unique opportunity to increase revenue from your games by incorporating in-app ads, while maintaining a strong player experience. In this blog and downloadable guide, we'll talk about success factors for your ad formats and placements, and how specific social casino publishers are seeing positive results with ads.
Why introduce in-app ads?
Social casino market growth has been strong – especially on mobile. The social casino industry saw a surge in user engagement in Q2 2020, along with record profitability for some companies, according to Eilers & Krejcik Gaming¹. Over the past 12 months, the social casino market grew +15.0% year over year to reach USD 6.22 billion, and social casino mobile revenue continues to account for 86% of the total market (Eilers & Krejcik Gaming: Q2 2020).
Many publishers are incorporating in-app ads alongside in-app purchases (IAP) to effectively position their gaming app for revenue growth and increased player engagement. And the majority (79%) of mobile gamer respondents report being happy with in-game ads² (2CV, 2020).
That said, success with a combination of in-app purchases (IAP) and ads is best achieved by choosing the right ad formats and entry points, along with effectively measuring and optimising performance.
To empower you with a winning strategy for integrating in-app ads for social casino games, we put together our top success factors in a useful guide that you can download below.
As a summary, here are a few of the best practices covered in the guide, along with tips from game publishers who are seeing success with ads in mobile games.
Use rewarded video ads
Rewarded video is an effective format for driving a positive player experience and maximising publisher revenue. No real money is exchanged when a player watches a rewarded ad; they may receive in-game coins, extra time or other rewards, while the publisher earns money via the advertiser or advertising network.
"When a game starts promoting in-app ads for the first time, it's important to have a test and learn strategy approach," said Sarah Ketir, Ads Monetisation Lead for Product Madness. "Rewarded video is the best ad unit option to start with, because it gives the user the option to view the ad or not. Overall, it's less intrusive."
Integrate the right entry points
When building rewarded video ads into a social casino game, success depends partly on your use of the entry points that best fit your game. Some common examples of social casino game entry points include:
During session: Place a rewarded video mid-game session in exchange for premium content/high-value items, as a great way to increase user engagement, session length and retention. This placement can get the highest number of impressions and a good click-through rate.
Lobby: Place a rewarded video in the lobby to increase session length or retention. As one of the highest-visibility locations, the lobby placement can be useful for introducing new users to the value exchange, although click-through rate can be lower.
Daily mission: Place a rewarded video in the daily mission to monetise active users daily. The integration is highly prominent at app launch, and helps with app retention by incentivising users to return to the game every day.
In our guide, we've included more common entry point examples, plus additional guidance on using interstitials and banner ads so that you can customise an ads strategy for your game.
Test and optimise for retention
Your players spend a lot of time in your game, and retention is critically important. As you are planning your ad implementation, it's important to build in a testing and optimisation phase to determine the right balance of IAA and IAP and ad frequency.
Gamesofa, one of the biggest Taiwanese social casino publishers, wanted to test in-app ads to find out which formats would work best with non-paying active users.
Traditionally, they'd used an IAP-only monetisation model and needed to ensure that retention and ARPDAU wouldn't be negatively affected. They opted to show Facebook Audience Network rewarded video ads to +30 days active players who had never made a purchase, giving them the option to engage or not.
The results? Players who watched ads spent a longer amount of time in-app, which boosted retention rates. Gamesofa also discovered that after traditionally non-paying players watched a rewarded video ad, they continued to make a purchase for the first time.
William Liu, Marketing Manager, Gamesofa shared: "By Q1 2020, we decided to integrate all of our social casino games into Facebook Audience Network."
Learn more success factors for IAA in social casino
As you introduce ads to your social casino game, you want to ensure that your integrations drive revenue, delight players and support your user acquisition efforts.
Our guide: Winning in social casino mobile games: Success factors for in-app ads offers sample rewarded video placements, insights to help you determine the right ad frequency and length, and guidance on testing ads with paying users, potential paying users and non-paying users.
¹Source: "Social Casino Tracker Recap-2Q20", Eilers Krejcik Gaming, 10 August 2020.
²Source: Mobile Games Advertising Report, 2CV (commissioned by Facebook Audience Network), a quantitative and qualitative study in the UK, US, DE, FR, TR, BR, AR, KR, JP, RU and VN between March to May 2020, July 2020.
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