Applovin MAX mediation: Step-by-Step Walkthrough for beginners by Felix Braberg

So AppLevin is the direct user acquisition network, which you can't not not work with.

And they will be your largest partner on this mediation platform because it's their mediation.

AppLevin Exchange is essentially a group of DSPs that bid in.

This is kind of the survivor of the early daylight Matej, UA, master eyes on the prize Tracking data through the cyberspace skies Felix acts dollars like a wizard in disguise disguise Jackups, Crafts and Rells lift us to the highs

Two and a half gamers talking smack Slow hockey stick got your back

Ads are beautiful they light the way Click it fast don't delay

Hello everyone and welcome to another solo monologue episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast where we help you stay two and a half steps ahead of the mobile gaming and mobile app industry. So after popular demand of the last video I did which was on an introductionary video on Google AdMob and how that mediation works, we got a lot of messages asking me to do a similar style of introduction video on how AppLubin Max and Max mediation works.
So that's exactly what I'm going to do today. In this video, or what this kind of video is designed to do,

is essentially to give anyone who's never used Max or Max Mediation before an introduction on how it works, how to set up apps, and how to read data, and some common pitfalls on what to avoid. So this is kind of designed for beginners, not really for intermediates, but it's a very good start.
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Now let's get back to the episode. So let's get started and jump into the interesting content.
So a little bit about me. I have been working in mobile ad monetization for close to eight years now.

I've worked in DSPs, ad networks, and I think I've spent a large portion of my adult life

inside of different mobile mediation platforms.

Yeah, I've worked with Macs, I've worked with Unity Level Play,

I've worked with AdMob.

So yeah, I live inside of these platforms basically. So if you have any questions after this, please feel free to message me.
So let's get started. So right now in mobile, I would say that Max Mediation has the largest market share.
I think probably anywhere between 70 to 80% of impressions in mobile is currently being mediated with Max.

If you don't know what a mediation platform is, essentially, it is a tool where you can get multiple networks to bid for your mobile ad inventory, which greatly increases the price that you're able to get.

And as of right now, Max mediation is the largest by market share. And that's essentially because of a couple of factors.
And the main one is that generally across the board on video inventory, you typically see the highest eCPMs or AdArpDows for interstitial and rewarded inventory on Macs, which is its biggest pro. Also, if you use AppLovin and Macs as your mediator, you also get access to AppLovin's AdROAS and Blended ROAS campaigns, which help users or helps mobile games or mobile apps scale quite a lot if they have a little bit of ad revenue.
So that's essentially when you have UA campaigns that optimize based on ad revenue instead of IAP revenue. Also, probably I would say Max is the mediation platform that has the least amount of manual work because they've emphasized the movement or moving away from the traditional waterfall where you set up placements.
And as a manager you need to actively manage to get the most amount of revenue and they're kind of moved away from that and they only work right now with mainly bidders which really reduces manual work and also max tends to have the broadest availability of the largest ad networks. It's not only roses, because essentially some of the cons of using Max is that their cross-promo tool has been deprecated as of January in 2025.
So now anyone who wants to do cross-promo inside of AppLevin Max essentially needs to use Google Ad Manager. And also, if you're mediating on Max, AppLevin tends to be your largest network partner, which can be a bit of an issue because they tend to have the longest and most aggressive video end cards and creative lengths in the industry, which can impact retention in negative ways.
So if you actually see a drop in retention when you move to Max, I highly recommend reaching out to them to reduce the actual creative and end card length, which you can do with an email to your account manager. So that's the pros and cons.
Moving ahead, just wanted to cover a bit on getting started. So once you apply for your AppLevin account and you're approved on Macs, you're able to log in and you're able to see this page.
So this is where you're going to be spending the majority of your time looking at data and getting your apps set up. So I took the liberty here of highlighting the things that are important to you as a publisher.

So yeah, this is what you see. What is the most important thing I would say is the performance tab, where you see all revenue-related data.
The user activity tab, which is more how many ads are being watched per user per day and the AdArpDow metrics. Advanced reporting, which we'll go into a bit later in this presentation,

and also ad units, which is where we're going to start this presentation, because this is actually where you need to go first when you're getting started to actually set up your various games or apps. So here's the main page for setting up.
This is the ad units tab. And essentially when When you log in here here you need to press create an ad unit and then you're taken to this page where you can name your app you have to name a android or ios app and you have to go into this field below and actually find your app inside of ios or the google play or the app store and then you have to set up the ad type.
So interstitial, rewarded, banner, etc. They have quite a lot of different ad types.
The app open is an interstitial ad format that is shown. Yeah, depending on when you put it, where you put in the app.
But essentially, here is usually where I see developers make the first mistake if they're new to AppLobin Max, which is that they set up multiple rewarded ad units for all the different rewarded placements in your game or in your app. So this is the first thing that could make your life quite a bit annoying.
And what I would recommend to do is set up one rewarded ad unit and then you set up all the rewarded ad units inside of your game or app from that one place. This helps you in managing your app, makes it a lot easier and really reduces manual labor.
Also, what tends to happen is that you tend to get a bit higher ECPM if you group everything together because ad networks tend to prefer ad units and responding to ad units if everything is in one. So there's a bigger pool of demand all put together.
So this is where you set up all your ad units. And this is pretty straightforward.
The one thing that you have to remember is to go to the bottom of the page and press save because if you don't do that and click out of it nothing gets saved so that's the first thing that you need to do to set up an app the main kind of networks that i usually recommend to get started with is for rewarded video and interstitials when you're on AppLovin and AppLovin Exchange is standard.

You can't even turn them off. So AppLovin is the direct user acquisition network, which you can't not work with.
And they will be your largest partner on this mediation platform because it's their mediation. AppLovin Exchange is essentially a group of DSPs that bid in.
This is kind of the survivor of the Mopub Exchange, which they bought, I think, in 2020 or 2018 or 2020. I can't remember the exact year.
For a rewarded video on interstitials, the other networks that I would recommend as of today of recording at its end of May in 2025 is Google, Unity, Meta, Mintegrel, and Maloco. Maloco is a bit hard because they're really good, but they haven't actually launched on the general population yet.
So keep a lookout for that. But this is essentially the networks that I would recommend on video inventory as of right now to get you started until you scale to about probably two or three K a day in ad revenue.
Keep in mind that these networks, the strength changes all the time for these networks, right? So if you're watching this video in maybe a year's time, you might be actually good to go to AppsFlyer's AppsFlyer Power Ranking for the Performance Index for the most recent one and see if the networks still kind of align with what you're seeing here. And basically, the AppsFlyer Performance Index is quite good to see how large networks are, because that essentially means that on the monetization side, they will have a lot of demand for your inventory.
So on banners, here again, it comes standard with Applovin and Applovin Exchange. And for banners, I would recommend to work with Google, Google Ad Manager, Mintegirl, and Digital Turban.
That's quite a good way to get started until you scale maybe to $500 to $600 a day in banner revenue. So how this works is that inside of the ad unit that you created that I showed you on the last slide, you can set up the networks here.
You need to go into the network dashboards and make an account. Then you can make the apps and the ad units there.
And then you need to set them up here by following the instructions in the little I. You toggle the status onto green.
And then you set up all the different networks that I just described. And then you go down and press save.
I have many times made a mistake that you don't press save. Just remember to press save and everything will be okay.
So the thing you need to do after you've set up your networks in your ad units is you also need to go to manage networks, which is the networks tab on the side. And then you also need to connect all the networks here that you have set up in your ad units.
So what is exactly that we're doing here? Essentially what we're doing is we're giving API access to these different dashboards so that they can pull the data inside of Macs to reduce the chances of getting miscounts, right? So the main thing to know about mediation platforms is that they centralize all the reporting, right? But when it comes time to paying out your publisher earnings, you actually don't get paid on the max numbers that you see in your mediation. You get paid on the amount of money you actually see in the various different networks.
So for example, if you have set up Mintegral, you get paid for Mintegral from their own dashboard earnings, right? And to minimize the risk of having a delta here like a big difference between what you see in the mediation platform and what you see in your network you need to set up the networks here to essentially allow the two channels to communicate more efficiently which really reduces the chances of yeah having a real big difference so let's say you're expecting to get $10,000 for one month from Integral. And for some reason, it's actually less.
Most likely, it's because you didn't set up the network here in the networks page. So don't forget to do that.
I've done it a couple of times. Not great.
But after you've set up your networks here and you set up the ad units, you're pretty much ready to go. Which brings us to the next part of this presentation, which is how to look at data in AppLive and Max.
So the things that I tend to check for the clients that I work with on a daily or weekly basis, depending on how much ad revenue you're actually generating. The first thing is in the performance tab.
So here you can toggle the time setting and also view by several different factors. One of the most important things that I tend to look at here is, yeah, this was a client that was nice enough to actually share their data with us.
But what basically you want to look at is the trend lines of overall revenue. So i usually look at once a week or once a day depending on the app is view by network view by country and view by revenue and what you're looking for is essentially if anything is deviating from the norm to indicate that something has gone wrong or something is breaking.
So what ideally you want

to get the most amount of revenue for your inventory is you want at least five or six

networks that are contributing at least over 5% of the overall revenue. And that essentially means

you have quite a lot of competition happening in the app. So if we're looking at this picture,

for example, we can see here that bid machine dropped quite a lot on the 11th of January.

So one of the things I would be looking at here would be why would that be happening, right? So if you see any big drops, if you see anything, you just need to check if the setup is done correctly, if something is broken, or reach out to the account manager that you have at these networks to find out why essentially something is decreasing or increasing quite a lot. Probably in this instance, if a memory serves me correctly, it's after Christmas.
So that's the reason why we saw some networks drop off in terms of performance. But that's essentially what I look for in the performance tab, which brings us to user activity.
So this out of the two tabs is also really important to check on a daily or weekly basis, depending on the amount of ad revenue that you're generating. So the user activity tab is where you can see things like AdArpDow, which is the most important metric for you to keep an eye on.
So AdArpDow gives you pretty much a clear channel of how your ad's performance is doing in despite of what you're doing on the UA side. So essentially AdArp.
is the average revenue or ad revenue per daily active user. Here you can also see things by the different ad units.
So the ad viewer rate, which is the percentage of users in your game or app that essentially sees your ads, ad viewer rate. A good benchmark here typically for rewarded ads is around 45% of users you want to interact with your rewarded ads or higher.
Interstitial ads, if you have them, usually a good metric for ad viewer rate is about 70%. And for banners, it's basically usually 70 or 80% that you want to hit for ad viewer rates.
Also here, you're able to see the impressions per DAU. This is essentially how many ads of the different ad units that you're actually showing to your user base.
Typically on healthy games that have rewarded ads, ideally you want to have between four to six rewarded ads on 45% of your user base if you want to have ads contributing in a major way to your bottom line. Interstitial ads, a bit different here, but if you want to have a game that scales typically with only ads, you want to have at least seven to eight interstitial ads per aimtau.
And if you want to have banner ads, typically depends on the banner refresh rates, but typically 80 to 120 impressions per DAU on a game that has about 25 minute gameplay per day usually will mean that you're earning probably 15 to 20 percent of ad revenue from banner ads. But yeah those are some things you can check here in the user activity tab and really important to check this.
This is also where you see if something is broken in your game. So this is where you can go and see if your impta has dropped off suddenly, for example, for banners and interstitials, that usually is an indication that user behavior has changed or something has changed with how you're serving ads.
So keeping it tight and look at this and the trend lines, it's really good essentially to keep a general idea of what's going on in your app or game. That brings us to A-B testing, right? So let's say that you've been running ads in a game or app for a while and you wanted to test some new things to improve your setup.
So actually right now, Max has announced that they will deprecate all waterfall placements except for Google Ad Manager and maybe AdMob. I'm not sure exactly about that.
So the amount of A-B testing you're actually going to be doing in Macs is greatly reduced because of this, but it's still a good idea to run A-B test when you're setting up new ad networks. So this is exactly how you do it.
You go into

add units and you click on these three dots that you see up in the corner and you basically press create A-B test. Then the waterfall is split into two, test and control group.
So in the test group you need to give it a nifty name. Don't give it something stupid but actually what you you're testing.
So for example, bid machine, AB test, 50% of user base. That's a good name of a test.
Then if you scroll down to the bottom, you essentially need to set up what the AB test is. So for example, if we're testing bid machine here, you need to set up bid machine in the test group and make sure it's not live in the control group.
Then you scroll all the way down and you press save. And that's when the A-B test starts.
And you're able to track the A-B tests in the A-B test tab where essentially you can keep a live track on the performance. Usually I would recommend to leave these A-B tests for, if you're testing a bidder, ideally you want to do a test for at least 10 to 14 days.
This test window changes dramatically depending on how big your app is or game is. So if you have a lot of impressions, this can be a lot shorter because what's happening is that it's more data points for you to see.
And essentially here you can see what the results will be if you promote this A-B test it's positive you promote and if it's negative you don't promote pretty simple stuff right but let's get on to something a bit more complicated and that is advanced reporting so advanced reporting is where you can really get into the granularity of how your app and how your ad stack is actually performing on Max. So like I said before, this is greatly being reduced because Max is moving away from placements, which is quite complicated to manage, to mainly bidders, which is a lot less things to manage.
But advanced reporting is still really good. And since we still have GAM networks, it'll still be a good way to see how you can optimize those placements.
So the thing to know about advanced reporting is that it's designed in a very clever way. So you can actually set reports here.
So this is usually the report that I recommend to set. So you write minus three days and yesterday inside of the date tab.
This essentially means that whenever you run the report, you'll get exactly the last couple of days. So also here, what I recommend is you set up your application network, network type and add placement.
That means that you can break down by the different networks and network types for placements what actually the performance is per placement. So what would a report like this look like? If you run a report like this, here is what you actually are looking in or looking to optimize.
So as I mentioned before, IronSource is no longer in the waterfall. AdMob probably will get removed from the waterfall, but Google Ad Manager will remain.
So when you're optimizing placements, what essentially you're looking for is the fill rate here in the column labeled fill rate and the revenue so what i would do here is you scroll down to the bottom of this report you look at the total revenue generated in the whole waterfall and what you're looking at what you're kind of looking to optimize here is that per placement, you want the fill rates to be above 1%, and you want the total revenue contribution of the one placement to also be above 1% of the total waterfall amount. So if your whole waterfall is earning $100, you want at least each placement to be earning $1 in this time frame that we set up in the last three days.
So that's what you're actually looking to do when you're optimizing placements, and that's all you're doing essentially. What that looks like is that, for example, here we looked at IronSource and AdMob.
You see that these two placements are filling below 1%.

They're filling at 0.2% and 0.23%.

And you see that Google Ad Manager at the same time

at 21 eCPM is filling at 3.65%.

So that essentially means that Google Ad Manager

can pay a higher price than $21 eCPM for this particular floor, which means that you probably should add a, instead of having a $21 placement, you should also add maybe a $25 or $26 placement, which means that network will pay more for your inventory. And that would be like a valid A-B test what you should run.
So that's how they look at advanced reporting. Like I mentioned, this tool will lose some of its power when everything is moved to header bidding, but it's still quite an effective tool because you can break down things by the hour or day, which means that you can, if you're testing something and you don't want to wait for the A-B test tool to spit out exactly what the uplift is.
Here you can actually use compare to also increase and see kind of what the performance is inside of your app or games. So that's everything I had for you on the basics of how to set up AppLove and Max.
So we covered a couple of things like what networks you should start with, how to look at data and how to use the advanced reporting tool. If you have any other questions on how to use AppLev and Max, please feel free to reach out to me.
But I think this is a very good start and should be enough until you get to maybe $500 to $1,000 a day in ad revenue. And yeah, we hope to see you again for one of these monologues and

if you like it please hit the subscribe button press the thumbs up button and hope to see you again

bye bye Thank you.