Ad monetisation: Fanatee’s Beatriz Dias on the importance of preserving user experience

Mobile advertising company Liftoff has invited inspirational women working on some of the biggest mobile games to discuss their achievements, challenges and future aspirations. This time, the focus is on Beatriz Dias, Monetisation Manager at Fanatee.

Just like a certain blue hedgehog, Beatriz Dias isn’t one to waste time. After studying business administration at Fundação Getulio Vargas in Brazil, she zoomed into game development studio Fanatee as an intern, then bolted through the ranks at supersonic speed to rise up as a monetisation manager. Today, she oversees ad monetisation for Fanatee’s extensive portfolio of word-based puzzle games, including CodyCross, Everyday Puzzles, LunaCross, and Stop 2.

Dias supervises the ad monetisation team, managing each stage of the daily ad revenue process. This includes maintaining ad quality to ensure that ads appear correctly, display appropriate content, and give players the correct rewards when applicable. She’s also part of a dedicated revenue team working on strategy and optimisation, maximising income through ad impressions while leveraging automation to generate comprehensive reports that allow Fanatee to swiftly identify in-game issues or revenue deviations as soon as they appear.

“The gaming industry develops fast: you always have to be on top of the latest trends and the best strategies to take,” Dias says. “This can be stressful, but working on something that so many people enjoy is also nice. Yesterday, I was looking on Slack and saw a screenshot of a player with a thousand-day streak in one of our games. We are part of the daily routine for many of our players, which I think is cool.”

Balancing user experience with monetisation

The biggest obstacle Dias faces in her role is player attitudes toward ads—so much so that “too many ads” is the number one complaint she hears from players, even in titles that feature little to no in-game advertising. For this reason, Dias places a lot of emphasis on preserving the user experience, which means monetising without interrupting the player as much as possible.

Dias is currently trying to do this by imposing rules that ad networks must follow. For example, one rule is that no more than two screens can be shown to a user in one ad placement. While this doesn’t reduce the time a player spends watching ads, it does reduce the overall number of ads they see, which Dias says helps reduce the chance of them becoming frustrated and uninstalling.

“It can be challenging to spot when users are having a bad experience,” Dias says. “We have to rely a lot of the time on user complaints, which isn’t ideal as it means we’re being reactive rather than addressing problems. Players are there to have fun. If they’re not enjoying something, nothing is stopping them from heading to the app store and downloading another game for free.”

Dias also highlights the importance of considering how specific audiences will interpret your game, which she learned from working with word-based puzzle games that attract a diverse range of players—many of whom are over 50 years old. When Fanatee added a competitive multiplayer mode to one of its most popular titles, CodyCross, it was a hit with younger players. Older players, however, found it frustrating as many of them simply couldn’t type as fast as those who’d grown up with apps.

“I was born with apps,” Dias says. “If I’m playing a game and I see an ad, it’s not something I really think about; I just close it, and that’s it,” Dias says. “But for many of our players, especially older ones, it can be a struggle to get back to the game as you have to press this tiny button at the top of the screen. You’ve got to think about that and consider how different people deal with technology.”

Ad monetisation and A/B testing tips

Is there such a thing as the perfect ad strategy? According to Dias, there’s no catch-all solution in ad monetisation: the most successful campaigns are built around the nuances of that specific game, its genre, and its target audience. However, that’s not to say she doesn’t have some tips from her time working in gaming that mobile marketers can’t learn from.

One of the first things Dias recommends is reviewing the pacing between your ads. For example, she says that while interstitial ads are best placed between gameplay segments, the user can be overloaded by ads if they appear after every short level. By increasing the frequency, the user will see fewer ads and hopefully have a more enjoyable overall experience.

“I think the one thing that most people forget to do is to play their games and their competitor’s games,” Dias says. “Sometimes you think your ad isn’t intrusive, you think that your placement is okay, and it’s only when you sit down and start playing that you realise the experience just doesn’t flow how it’s supposed to.”

With more and more publishers turning to rewarded ad formats, Dias says you must carefully balance user engagement and your in-game economy. If your rewarded ads don’t provide players with something they consider valuable, they’re not going to repeatedly spend 30 seconds of their valuable time engaging with them. Likewise, if you give out too many rewards, players might begin to find the game itself too easy as they’re inundated with in-game resources and other valuable items.

Dias notes that understanding the impact of banner ads can be tricker. Increasing their frequency doesn’t tend to have much effect on long-term retention. Still, it can result in shorter sessions in the here and now—meaning users may encounter less, more engaging formats during their playtime (such as video or interstitials). For that reason, Dias says that to get an accurate measure of everything going on and compare CPMs, revenue, and other details, you need to conduct A/B tests.

“When testing, sometimes it’s better to take a step back and look at the bigger picture,” Dias says. “We used to run our A/B tests over three days and had some fairly good results, but recently, we’ve been conducting tests for over two weeks and encountered changes to data when analysing over an extended period. Letting our tests be active for longer has made us think more about our decisions and better understand the behaviour of each ad network in each setup, which is really valuable.”