Manual vs Automatic Mediation: Which One Earns More?

In every fight, there’s always a winner. In app monetization, there’s always a way to earn more.

App monetization and the ways to do it can be confusing, but don’t be overwhelmed! We’ve tasked ourselves here at AdtoApp to bring you a comprehensive review of both manual and automatic mediation–two of the ways to monetize your app. We will compare the two methods and find out which one can bring the most earnings to you.

Let’s get to know the methods and compare

Manual Mediation

With this method, the publisher personally chooses the ad network to advertise in, monitors the ads and optimizes them as needed. The process goes like this:
Publishers install the software development kit (SDK) of their chosen ad networks to their app.

If they want to advertise with more than one ad network in their spread, they need to install multiple SDKs.

Conflicts usually arise when more than one SDK is installed.

The publisher has to constantly monitor for changes in the ad network’s rates.
If the publisher doesn’t optimize by choosing the best rate, the app is losing revenue.

Automatic Mediation

With automatic mediation, there is a one-time SDK installation of the mediation program by copy-pasting 8 lines of code. Once the installation is complete, the program integrates the app with multiple ad networks. From there, automatic mediation program works like this:
The program uses optimization algorithm–a mathematical formula integrated inside the program–to choose the best ads.
What is ‘fill rate’ and why is it important?
Fill rate is a great metric used to gauge your method’s effectiveness. If you’re getting a higher fill rate, it means you’re selling more ads and earning more.

Fill rate is the percentage of ads that are actually bought and filled based on the number of ads you allocate to an advertiser or your whole campaign. For example, if you–the publisher–allocate 500,000 spots to fill with ads and 500 of those failed to display for some reason, the fill rate would be 99%. How did we compute this? Here’s the formula:

As you can tell, the closer to 100% the fill rate is, the better. It is very rare and almost impossible for a single ad network to buy all your ad spots, so the best way is to sell it to many ad networks.

Fill Rate: Manual vs Automatic

Manual Mediation

Conflicts due to multiple SDKs drops you to a starting point of ~90% Unstable ad networks not reporting precise rates= ~10% fill rate loss Changes in revenue stream= ~10% fill rate loss
Bugs caused by constant manual testing= ~10% fill rate loss Human error margin with manual control= ~10%