Free admon: Ad monetization insights now available in Singular’s free tier

Singular’s free tier now has free admon insights included along with global-best mobile attribution, ROI analytics, the best available SKAN analytics, fraud prevention, and deep linking solution. Click play below and keep reading for more details …

The new capability is thanks to product innovation from the Singular R&D team that will aggregate ad monetization postbacks for your ad network partners, enabling them to get insight and optimize campaigns without deluging them with postbacks for every single ad a user or player watches.

The even better news?

Singular’s free admon solution offers exactly the level of insight and transparency for marketers, product managers, and monetization experts that you’ve come to expect from Singular in user acquisition and cost data.

From all available datasets, just like UA data.

“When you’re monitoring your UA data, you’re going to be checking: is it the same that it looks like with the reports?” says Singular director of product Lisi Gardiner. “You have to look at the MMP data, the network reported data, and then the modeled data. And so the same thing with admon: you want to see: what’s the mediator reporting versus what is the monetization network reporting?”

“So the Singular solution basically gives you access to all these different datasets so that you have transparency and control over what’s being reported across all the different platforms that you’re working with to be able to market and monetize your application.”

Singular’s free tier (yes, it exists)

It might be a fairly well-kept secret in the mobile attribution and marketing measurement space, but Singular does have a free tier of service. You can test it without handing over your credit card details, and it includes the best of what Singular has to offer as the leading privacy-safe attribution platform.

That list includes:

• 15,000 paid conversions
• Mobile attribution
• ROI analytics
• Data management
• Fraud prevention
• Cross-platform measurement for email, SMS, web, social, and mobile campaigns
• Internal cross-promotion
• Deep linking, deferred deep linking, and QR code links
• SKAN attribution
• SKAN cohorts
• Customizable dashboards
• Creative reporting
• And more … now including free admon revenue monitoring and measurement. (Find out more about what that means in our ad monetization product overview.)

 

Ad monetization: adding a critical dataset

If you offer a free app, especially in the casual or hypercasual game sectors, ad monetization is likely a significant part of your revenue. For many apps, it might literally be ALL of your revenue.

How can you possibly calculate accurate ROI, ROAS, and LTV without having a way of measuring and managing the amount of ad monetization revenue you take in? Plus, to really know how your marketing campaigns are working, you need to match that revenue to cohorts of users, partners, and specific campaigns.

You might just use one mediation platform to keep it simple.

Then you might try to stitch that admon data together with user acquisition data, pulling revenue data from your mediation partner and applying it with a pinch of data science and a dab of magic to tie it into your marketing, costs, and acquisition data.

Good luck.

“For you to be properly able to optimize and make improvements, you need to be able to go more granular. And that’s where having the full combo of being able to pull in all your marketing costs and activity and combine it with the admon data is critical,” Gardiner says.

When you’re starting out, you don’t have as sophisticated a data management platform or growth stack as the bigger players. So achieving that is hard if not impossible.

The solution is connecting advertising cost, user acquisition numbers, and revenue (ad monetization and IAP/subscription, if you have it) together in a very granular way.

“We receive user level data for every time an ad is watched and we understand the value of that ad being watched as reported by the mediator,” Gardiner says. 

Being able to connect that data with cohorts, campaigns, and ad partners then allows marketers to understand the ROI of their campaigns and the LTV of their users.

Free admon: how Singular was able to do it without DDoSing ad partners

Singular wasn’t previously able to offer ad monetization in the free product tier for a simple reason: too many postbacks.

Traditionally, MMPs like Singular send a postback to an ad network to inform them that an install happened or a revenue event occurred. This closes the loop on user acquisition, providing insight that helps ad networks optimize their campaigns on marketers’ behalf.

But while you can do that for an IAP that is $5 or $10 or $25, and while it makes sense for a significant event such as an app install, ad views are different. Ad networks aren’t built to accept postbacks for $0.001 of value accrued due to an ad impression. Not only is the amount too small, the number of postbacks would be overwhelming. Free admon wouldn’t be possible.

“We’ve heard from partners where it’s problematic for them to ingest this level of volume, because especially with hypercasual, the volume of ads being served can be quite high,” Gardiner says.

Imagine a hypercasual game with millions of players watching tens of millions of ads each day inundating an ad network with 30 million, 40 million, or even 100 million postbacks on a daily basis. The effect for some could be similar to a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack … which would not be great for their core business. It would also be expensive on Singular’s side.

Singular’s innovation: batching postbacks.

“So the user, for example, watches 10 ads in one day, or in one session,” Gardiner says. “Maybe that accumulates to $1 per user. We can send that instead of saying: ‘Okay, there were 20 events.’”

Fewer postbacks equals less processing with the same amount of information being delivered. And since it’s at a much lower cost, it all works for both Singular and network partners, making free admon feasible.

Ad networks supported

Singular has integrations with the top mediators available, Gardiner says, so you’re pretty much fully covered on the major players. 

That includes Unity/ironSource, AdMob, AppLovin, and more. 

As Singular gets additional requests to add more mediation platforms and data connectors, the team is adding more, and the free admon solution will get even more comprehensive.

Plus, of course, ad monetization in your SKAN conversion models

iOS app developers make casual and hypercasual games too. And they also make ad-supported apps. But they don’t have the same level of visibility that Android developers currently have with GAID. (Until Privacy Sandbox, of course. More on that here.)

So ad monetization revenue has to be visible in an SKAdNetwork scenario as well for iOS developers to build out their acquisition, growth, marketing, and revenue plans.

So, what you can do is set up ad monetization events as part of your SKAN conversion model in Singular.

“We’re making sure that there are no gaps in terms of your marketing strategy and you have the full solution in terms of UA, seeing that with traditional attribution, seeing that within the SKAN framework, and being able to audit all the data across all the different activity that you’re doing,” Gardiner says.

Plus, there are some additional product features the team is working on that will be added to the ad monetization solution in the near future.

Next steps: how to get free admon and MMP services

Sounds interesting? Wondering how to get it … without having to fork over your credit card information or sit through a long sales pitch?

Start here: you’ll be able to sign up and get going almost immediately.

If perhaps you’re a bit bigger … you’re in growth phase or even enterprise, but being able to see ad monetization data side-by-side with cost, campaigns, and other revenue sounds good, there’s a solution for you too.

Book a demo. 

You’ll be able to chat through the solution with a Singular expert and see if it fits your needs.