The Smaato Blog

Diwali is the most widely celebrated festival in the Indian community. Commonly termed Festival of Lights, Diwali begins on November 7 this year and spans over five days. During Diwali, people are typically decked out in new clothes, while houses are cleaned and decorated with colorful lights and lamps. It is also a time where families bond and connect with each other — often by using their mobile phones. 

The first half of 2018 was a time of significant change for the mobile advertising industry — especially in the wake of the new European data privacy regulation, GDPR. Our newly-released Global Trends in Mobile Advertising report analyzes the ad requests and impressions from the Smaato platform in H1 2018 in order to identify the latest mobile advertising trends, including how the GDPR has affected mobile ad spending behavior.

Viewability is an ongoing concern for advertisers, and for good reason. Knowing that ads are actually being viewed by users is the cornerstone of any successful campaign. With that in mind, we are making it easy for advertisers to find the inventory with the highest in-app ad viewability rates on our platform. We do this by allowing advertisers to directly target inventory that has been analyzed using Moat, the leading independent mobile viewability measurement provider.

News apps are an advertiser's dream. They have high reach, engaged readers with above-average salaries, and most importantly they offer a brand-safe environment. Because of this, advertisers are willing to pay a premium to reach this audience. 

How much exactly are advertisers willing to pay? On the Smaato platform, the average eCPM for news apps is 44% higher than the overall average. With such high rates, building a strong monetization plan around an app is a big opportunity for news companies of all sizes. Here are our four tips to help maximize news app revenue:

We are making it easier than ever to ensure that our partners' mobile advertising campaigns are reaching their desired audiences at the right time with a new precision targeting feature: Pre-Packaged Deals.

Last year, Smaato released Open Deals, which are curated whitelists of apps that enable demand partners to purchase verified end-user inventory deals, saving time and effort in searching and selecting the most accurate targeting options. Now, after a successful testing phase, we are very happy to introduce Pre-Packaged Deals, the newest targeting feature within the Smaato Demand Platform (SDX). These professionally-curated, brand-safe inventory packages, now available in SDX, make precision targeting easy — just browse, select, click, and go!

When embarking on the journey of developing a mobile game, the topic that every app developer has on their mind is monetization. How will this game make money?! Creating games isn’t cheap and with the majority of mobile games on the market being free, developers are having to turn to alternative mobile game monetization strategies outside of just selling access to their product.

In-game advertising is one of the most straightforward ways to quickly begin generating revenue from your mobile game. With a variety of ad formats and sizes, it is easy to build a custom in-app advertising strategy that fits both to your game and your business goals. To get you started, here are our top tips for creating an effective mobile game monetization strategy.

The Smaato Demand Platform (SDX) is a particularly powerful tool for mobile advertising that enables demand-side platforms (DSPs) to manage sophisticated, self-service targeting.

Now, we are pleased to offer yet another exceptional feature to aid in the targeting and retargeting of verified end-users: device ID targeting.

Games are the most underestimated advertising medium in the mobile world. Besides attracting a huge and diverse audience of engaged players (2.3 billion, to be exact), mobile games also offer an engaging environment that is conducive to a positive advertising experience — a feature that we explored in The Mobile Games Playbook. Unfortunately, many advertisers continue to misunderstand mobile games and their popularity among smartphone users. In this post, we try to dispel three myths pervasive among advertisers in order to prove how safe and attractive these apps are for discerning brands and advertisers.

Over the past year, I have been faced with a dilemma as a Product Manager at Smaato: Should we extend our support for VPAID on the client-side? This dilemma arose from statements floating around that range from predicting the end of VPAID to highlighting its growing demand. Let me take a step back from the rumors, define the purpose of VPAID as intended by its creators from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and then move on to explain how we at Smaato chose to resolve this dilemma.

Smartphone users spend nearly one hour per day on average playing mobile games — that’s over 25% of their total mobile time! Meanwhile, only 7% of mobile ad dollars are going to mobile games, leaving a huge gap between consumer engagement and ad spending. This gap represents a massive opportunity for advertisers to get noticed in mobile games and harness the power of this large and diverse audience of mobile gamers.

The Mobile Games Playbook uncovers what makes mobile games score so high with consumers and how advertisers can get in on the mobile in-app game. This guide focuses on four features that in-game advertising so attractive: innovative environment, high-scoring reach, engaged users, and top ad formats.