Stop Ignoring these 6 ad placements in 2025 by Felix Braberg

That these are the step offers or rewarded offer chains that can be used for IAPs.

So, how it actually works is that you have a step offer chain where usually the first two items that you can click on are small ticket soft currency items that you can actually click on to get stuff for free.

And then the next item would actually be a rewarded ad.

You can see it's appearing here for free for a rewarded ad.

So, usually, how I've tested this with my clients is that that instead of serving the normal offers, which would be a pop-up where there's a discounted price, actually, how you present that offer is that you

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to a special episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast where you can stay two and a half steps of the mobile gaming industry.

So as you can see, it's a very special episode today because it's only me here and I'm here to talk to you about six ad placements that I've seen converting extremely well that I've been using with my clients in the last couple of months.

So

as I'm alone, it's only going to be ads and that's what we're going to talk about.

But before we get started, I just wanted to kind of share how I think about ad placements and how to stay on top of what actually works extremely well with ad placements.

And that is, you try to look at the largest ad monetized games in the industry.

You play these games, and then you have a very good chance of knowing that if there's something implemented in these games, that these type of ad placements convert extremely well.

So what games is it that I'm looking at right now?

So if you're an avid follower of my content, or this is a shameless plug for my sub stack, I actually made a post about this last week about the top ad monetized games on Android.

But if you're not, let me just share the screen here.

And these are the games that I tend to keep a very close eye on because these games are very large and they earn a lot of ad revenue.

So the games I tend to keep a track of.

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Now let's get back to the episode.

Play on a weekly basis is Wudoku by Triple Dot, Happy Color by X Flow, Vita Mayong by Vita Studio, Fugo, Word of Wonders, great game.

And then all obviously Block Blast.

So anything new that I see there, I tend to keep a kind of mental note.

And then basically across my client portfolio, I tend to test these ad placements because historically, these type of ad placements that I've gotten from these games tends to work extremely well.

All right, so now I want to dive into the six ad placements.

So I'm going to show a couple of video and explain what's actually happening.

So the first video that I want to share is from Coffee Mania.

It's not particularly an ad placement that's only here, but what it helps to do is showcase how offers and how you display offers has actually changed quite radically in the last couple of years and how offers can be used to also be a avenue for first-time purchases but also to increase your overall ad revenue.

So if I share the screen here we can see here

that these are the step offers or rewarded offer chains that can be used for IAPs.

So how it actually works is that you have a step offer chain where usually the first two items that you can click on are

ticket soft currency items that you can actually click on to get stuff for free.

And then the next item would actually be a rewarded ad.

You can see it's appearing here for free for a rewarded ad.

So, usually, how I've tested this with my clients is that instead of serving the normal offers, which would be a pop-up where there is a discounted price, actually, how you present that offer is that you have free, free, rewarded ad, paid, then free, free.

So, that basically changes the way how the offer is presented and also creates sort of a ladder in the player's mind where they're actually clicking on the things and they can see that they can get even more offers if they make the perf purchase to actually get free stuff afterwards as well it's one of the placements that i've utilized the most in the last six months with my clients and it's worked extremely well.

So test this, basically split up your offer in some free items, add a rewarded ad.

And then what you can also do is add a notification button that essentially illuminates every time there's a rewarded ad available in the setup or in kind of the step offer chain.

So the next game I wanted to talk about is Screwmaster 3D.

And this was a great episode where we had Samantha on for Supersonic to talk about what kind of interesting things are doing on the back end of this game.

So we have ad placements that basically get users to watch ads and convert.

But also what you have on the other side is on the back end, you also have a lot of stuff that you can do to improve your revenue.

And one of the most interesting things that she revealed from this episode was on how to actually change the mediation setup to maximize your ad revenue based on the recency effect.

So what is the recency effect?

Every network that you plug into

bids on your inventory under the assumption that the first impression is where the user has the most amount of attention.

And then subsequently, after you have multiple impressions, the per value,

the per value price that you're paid per impression decreases because networks assume that you have less attention.

So what did Supersonic do to essentially get the better of this kind of recency effect?

So what they did was on first app open, what they do is that they call and cache both an interstitial ad and both a rewarded ad.

And then what they do is they create an if-then statement.

So let's say you're watching three or four rewarded ads in a row.

Then what they do every time you click on the call rewarded ad button is that they double check that the ECPM you're actually getting for the interstitial is not higher than the rewarded ad.

So what they do is, for example, after six impressions on the rewarded side, is what they do is instead of calling the rewarded ad they call an interstitial ad because it's still worth more.

So the recency effect is separated by the different ad units.

So let's say that you have served already five rewarded impressions to the user.

Maybe the interstitial impression that you have already cached is actually worth more than the sixth rewarded impression.

Very clever way of actually maximizing the revenue.

So one word of caution on this is that you can only serve interstitials in a rewarded slot and you can't do it vice versa because

rewarded ads are actually intent and what they have is essentially

you need to have the 30 seconds so you can't do it the other way around so you can't call a rewarded ad in the interstitial slot because then eventually what will happen is that networks will catch on and they'll demonetize your inventory

So another blast from the past that I've used quite a lot.

I'll showcase it here in this video from WholeIO by Voodoo.

And I kind of call it the

convert or die method for rewarded ads or interstitials where you have natural gameplay such as this where you know you're playing around with the different users.

Let me just fast forward.

So you're actually beating the level and then you're coming to a natural break in the game where you have a rewarded ad.

Let me just pause it here, right?

So this is what I call convert or dive.

So usually what you do here in any hybrid casual game is that you you would have a natural break and serve an interstitial ad.

So one thing I've been experimenting a lot with my clients is actually when you come to these natural breaks, you give the option to watch a rewarded ad.

Here in this case, it's to get bigger.

And then actually, if you actually press the rewarded ads button, you load the rewarded ad button.

But if you don't press it to skip it, you actually serve an interstitial.

So in that case, you're kind of maximizing the potential value of an impression from from a user because the ecpm for rewarded ads tends to be so much higher than interstitial ads so no matter what happens the user will see an ad but if they have they have the option to watch a rewarded ad and actually get something from it also what i found with this placement what happens is that over a long period of time what happens is that users actually get used to this so when they actually get faced with the option to watch a rewarded ad when they know an interstitial is coming they choose to watch the rewarded ad because they know they're going to be served with an ad no matter what.

So, that's enough of videos.

So, the actual next three placements that I wanted to showcase, I'm going to fire up the emulator.

And it's kind of nice not having Jakob or Matthia here because they usually stress me out with this.

But

here is

the fourth placement, which I think just deserves so much credit.

So, this is Word Search Explorer by Indian Studio Play Simple Games.

And one kind of little trick that I usually do to showcase or to basically gauge how good a placement is is seeing if a studio has multiple similar types of titles in their portfolio.

If the ad placement gets rolled out across the whole portfolio that wasn't there before, that's usually a really good canary in the coal mine sign that this ad placement works extremely well.

And this placement that I'm going to talk talk about right now has now been

rolled out across their whole portfolio.

So I have a strong sense that this placement is converting really well.

So what the placement is, is essentially a rewarded ad placement when you leave the store instead of actually inside of the store.

So what PlaySimple did was if you go to the store, And if you don't purchase anything, when you then leave the store, what happens is that you're served the rewarded ad button.

Let me show you here, right?

So we're gone into the store and we've had a look and we've decided not to buy anything.

And there you go.

You can see that then you're served with a full screen kind of pop-up that says you can earn 25 more coins by watching a video.

So extremely clever because kind of what you're doing is you're segmenting the users as well by, hey, if I'm not making a purchase, yeah, we should see the ad placements.

But also what you're doing then after is that you're highlighting the rewarded ad placements placement as a standalone thing, so it eliminates the noise, and it's kind of also like, Yeah, I want to watch some coins when I leave.

But then, kind of, the interesting sign on this: this game has been scaling like crazy, but then they took this ad placement and also moved it across their whole portfolio.

So, what I've been telling my clients to do is, hey, instead of having your rewarded ad button inside of your store, actually show it when someone leaves the store without purchasing anything as a standalone pop-up.

And yeah, so far, from my aspect, it's converting extremely well.

So also one thing I want to show from another game that I've been playing.

So I haven't played it a lot on Android, but this is

I've been playing it a lot on iOS, and that's Colour Maze Adventure by Triple Dot.

And the thing that they're kind of really good at in this game is that it's a bit of a hyper-casual game where you're solving these puzzles.

However, one of the things that they do extremely well and one thing that I think is extremely undermonetized currently is that they allow you to watch ads for different paint schemes or skins.

So for example, the yellow scheme, you have to watch three rewarded ads in a row or pay coins for it.

So what they do is actually, yeah, five ads for unlocking a different maze.

or

watch two rewarded ads for watching watching rewarded ads to unlock a different colored ball, in this case, the Earth ball.

So what they do is they actually move skins

and different types of paint jobs or mazes, and they put them behind rewarded ads, right?

And one of the things I've actually done, I did for a client a couple of weeks ago.

We don't work together anymore, but anyway, what we did was we actually looked at the first TCPM value of the user from the first cached ad.

And what we did was we actually used that ECPM value to actually decide if we show the rewarded ad placements or not, if they're a likely purchaser or not, essentially.

And it's working extremely well.

Then the last thing or the last ad placement out of the six that I wanted to showcase, it's more of a meta feature.

So let me actually go here to one of the OGs in the industry, which is Subway Surfers.

So Subway Surfers monetizes only with rewarded ads.

It has probably, I would say, the

most amount of organic downloads in mobile history.

But what they do extremely well is what I call meta rewards for rewarded ads.

And it's also another thing that I've started implementing on a lot of clients that tends to convert extremely well.

So what is it?

It's essentially awarding users for watching a lot of rewarded ads.

So there's a bunch of other games that do this, but it really has a lot of powerful features.

So basically, if you watch 10 rewarded ads, then what happens is that you unlock some kind of in-game reward.

So, idle, like I've done this a lot on idle arcade games.

For example, if you watch 10 rewarded ads in a day, your movement speed increases.

And what we see is that whenever you implement these meta rewards from watching a lot of ads, there's actually a lot of ad whales that actually love to watch a lot of ads.

So, they will actually watch 10 or 15 rewarded ads to get these meta rewards that then increases your overall ad arcd out, which is helpful because then you can run ad monetized or ad-driven revenue campaigns,

which actually helps.

So try this out as meta rewards.

And I've seen some really good results from this.

So that wraps it up for my little short episode on the top kind of ad placements that I've been experimenting with.

If you have any questions, my email address is here in the show notes.

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Have a great day and best of luck with your ad monetization ad placements.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.