POST-HOLIDAY SEASON SYNDROME OF PUBLISHERS

In the 2019 holiday season, like every year before, campaigns, eCPMs, and app usages have reached their annual peaks. Mobile app publishers wait for and make most of their revenue in the holiday season every year and 2019 ended up with higher earnings as well.

The 2019 holiday season was a very prosperous and effective one for all our publishers. eCPMs have increased up to x4 on average, as well as impressions and revenue. Compared to 2018, 2019 holiday season was more efficient and profitable. As advertisers compete to get higher impressions and more bids, app publishers benefited the season with higher eCPMs and of course MORE REVENUE! 

Why So Profitable:

  • Black Friday
  • Thanksgiving
  • Christmas
  • New Year

For all brands and advertisers, it is so important to reach many consumers during Black Friday and Christmas. Since the holiday is longer and shopping/consumption is higher, every brand wants to get the highest slice from this most abundant time of the year. As the competition gets tense, so does brands’ willingness to pay more for ads. Mobile publishers, in the end, get the maximum benefit from this season.

Post-Holiday January: Farewell High eCPMs

Its this time of the new year: Holiday season is over. Seasonal uplift is finished, Ecpms are dropping back to their earlier level just like campaign traffics, impressions decrease back: Post-holiday syndrome is here!

Brands and advertisers spend minimum money on advertisements in January. January is the month of planning budgets and the year ahead for all companies. The whole industry tends to decrease the campaigns and eCPMs which makes January a very low paying and still month. Consequently compared to Q4, Q1 brings less ad revenue for publishers.

However, this is a seasonal trend for which publishers should not panic. Revenue and eCPM drop in January is not related to your app’s internal performance as long as you do not make any changes. Though, as mentioned above, it’s because of the industry’s seasonality. This drop can be up to 30% regarding different ad zones and geographies.

How to Benefit From Seasonality: Lower CPIs

Although publishers have lower revenues and eCPMs after the holiday season in January, there are certain advantages of this still period as well. Lower costs for impression mean lower costs for install as well! Publishers can revise their user acquisition strategies in this period and benefit from lower costs per install. As competition and costs are low, publishers can acquire new users to their apps.

UA Strategy Means More Than Cheap Installs

However, the best strategy for making better UA campaigns is not cheap installs Its goal is not to get the cheapest user as well. So rather than spending money all the way, it’s more crucial to develop strategies to use your budget smarter. A well-developed User Acquisition strategy is valuable than everything.

Broadening the perspective; the level of engagement and retention, in-app, and ad revenue generated by new users or lifetime value of newly acquired users tell more about the success of any UA strategy. Whether or not your new users are engaging in revenue-generating activities within your app determines the real value of them.

How ADMOST Can Help You

Admost’s ad mediation technology meets with Adjust’s mobile marketing measurement infrastructure, and the result is a full end-to-end platform for mobile marketing management. Tracking real-time performance of a wide range of campaigns is often very hard. With Admost-Adjust partnership, our publishers can compare each campaign through all creatives, ad source, and geographies. The result is better campaigns and higher profits! With this partnership, we enable our publishers to track and increase the efficiency of their UA campaigns, in-app purchase and ad revenues via a single dashboard.