The holiday season is meant to be festive, joyful, and fruitful for the business, and the mobile app business is no exception. However, last-minute Christmas shopping, New Year’s family gatherings, and less than festive global inflation can cause your audience’s behavior changes. When it comes to ad formats, the choice can seem complicated. Knowing the global trends on where the lowest-hanging fruits are can help you quickly course-correct your ad strategy.
New research from the self-publishing platform Appodeal finds that pretty much every market sees an uplift in its Android full-screen ad ecpm in the 2023 holiday season, while on iOS they remain the same as a year ago.
Rewarded video ads on iOS were yielding the highest return in 2019. Since then, the monetization environment has become more challenging for developers and publishers. The iOS revenues haven’t bounced back to their 2019 level, but the ongoing holiday shopping season looks promising and, if you play your cards right, rewarding. Some markets have improved their rewarded video ads offerings across both iOS and Android.
While the USA, Australia, and South Korea are showing a moderate 5% growth in iOS rewarded ads eCPM, France is boasting a 24% increase compared to 2021. In France, where rewarded ads on iOS take up a 2.84% share of all the impressions and handle 23.57% of the revenue, the eCPM reaches a $7.58 mark this holiday season, giving way to Taiwan with the value of $7.88. Remarkably, Taiwan is the global leader in impressions to revenue ratio in rewarded ads with an 8.9% share on iOS and 8.62% on Android yielding 56.27% of the revenue.
Appodeal also found that the USA is outperforming other countries with $12.42 full-screen ads eCPM on Android. It is followed by $9.79 in Australia and $8.83 in Canada. In the USA, it has been steadily growing year after year, and almost doubled its value from $6.87 in 2018 to $12.42 this year’s holiday season. A very similar pattern can be seen in Brazil, Taiwan and Turkey.
No fortune teller can promise cash in this economy, but if there was ever a time to try a new ad format, geo or audience segments, if you have not already, now is the time.
“The biggest takeaway is that leveraging seasonality is a powerful tactic to grow your revenue. The trick is, to keep the momentum publishers need enough flexibility to target different markets, including abilities to test new hypotheses quickly, add or remove ad networks and be able to hop on the opportunities that short-term bring the best value. We found that by getting seasonality right, apps and games can easily make up to 20% increase,” said Tanya Moroz, VP Customer Success, Appodeal Stack.
Find out more about which markets are most likely to bring you growth this holiday season.
