Use Ad Mediation or Get Left Behind

It’s simple; you need to work with multiple networks to maximize your app’s earning potential, which is a product of two measurements:

1. Fill Rate — the rate at which ads are successfully shown to users.
2. eCPM — a prediction of how much an ad network will pay per 1,000 impressions.

But, here is the catch…

Working with multiple ad networks can be a headache of migraine proportions. Of course, you can send manual requests to each network, but how will you know that you are choosing the network with the highest eCPM?

One solution is to create a back-end system that automates and optimizes the request process for you. Let’s take a high-level view:

1. Gather historical data from each network to predict eCPM
2. Create a request hierarchy with decision logic that is mapped to specific filters
3. Optimize your request hierarchy according to eCPM and other network data
4. Automate the system so that it does all of this in as close to real time as possible
5. Maintain the system and update it whenever necessary, e.g. when you add a network.

Luckily there is an alternative…using a mediation platform

With a mediation platform, you create a “mediation stack” of the ad networks you work with and provide the parameters for how the platform will choose between them. Once the mediation stack is set-up, the platform will send ad requests to the networks according to their relative position until the requests are filled.