The adoption of in-app bidding is gradually picking up pace in the mobile gaming industry, as leading developers have started integrating it into their monetization strategy.

One such company, Jam City, turned to ironSource’s in-app bidding solution, LevelPlay, for their hit game, Panda Pop! ironSource caught up with their monetization manager, Kiel LeBaron, to hear about its impact on their business.

Time is priceless

Jam City saw LevelPlay as an opportunity to automate the time-consuming manual management of waterfalls across various geos and apps, each with dozens of instances. Saving this time enabled Jam City’s monetization team to shift their focus onto the product, communicating closely with the product team to optimize the placement of their ads. "That time is really maximized and could theoretically be a 50-100% to 2x increase in overall ad revenue," Kiel told us.

Improving KPIs

One of the main selling points of in-app bidding is increasing competition for every impression. Jam City saw this in action: using LevelPlay, they improved the performance of key metrics, leading to both increased revenue and a better user experience. “We saw an increase in impressions and fill rate through rewarded video, not banners. That was a surprise to us. We also saw our retention increase quite a little bit," Kiel explained.

There was a positive correlation between rewarded video ads and retention: LevelPlay freed up time for Jam City to optimize the placements of the ads and, in turn, retention.

Key tips

In-app bidding may be an automated process, but there are certainly ways to optimize its performance, as Kiel explains:

“I’d say from a key tips perspective, definitely build towards an A/B testing solution. I think that’s first and foremost. The other tip is have really strong dialogue with account managers at the respective networks that are in and competing in automated waterfall with bidding because they might have some insight that you might not be able to get from the front end”.