One question that I hear from developers is about the type of ads they see delivered in their apps from ad networks. The ads they see are often not really relevant to the content of the app, which seems like a huge miss when the app has a well-defined theme.<\/p>\n
For example, a friend of mine has a fitness app and he wants to run ads in it that are related to fitness. Makes sense right? Health and fitness is a huge niche with a lot of money and advertisers in it. You know the user is interested because they downloaded your app in the first place. Seems like a perfect fit if you could just force the ad network to show relevant ads.<\/p>\n
It Can Be Done<\/strong><\/p>\n It is<\/em> possible to do this. All ad creatives (meaning the actual image that you see when the ad displays) are categorized according to the standardized Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) categories. You can see an example of these categories here [https:\/\/dev.twitter.com\/mopub\/marketplace\/iab-categorization].<\/p>\n Because there are certain categories of ads that many developers may want to specifically exclude such as dating or gambling (listed as \u201cCard Games\u201d), all SSPs and some ad networks will allow you to block IAB categories. If you put a block on a category, no ads from that category will appear in your app. So, if you block all<\/em> categories other than<\/em> the health and fitness category, then ads from that category are all you\u2019ll see in your app!<\/p>\n Don\u2019t Do It<\/strong><\/p>\n Now that you have the know-how to do it, I\u2019d strongly advise you not<\/em> to do so. There are a lot of reasons why a given user may not see ads that are contextually relevant to the site. The goal of an ad network or an SSP is to show the most profitable<\/em> ad at any given moment, not the most contextually relevant ad. And as the person who receives most of that money, it\u2019s in your best interest as well.<\/p>\n Here are some of the reasons that you might see ads that appear irrelevant:<\/p>\n \u00b7 Retargeting \u2013 Even if you\u2019ve yet to run your first ad, you\u2019re probably familiar as a consumer with retargeting. You go to Amazon, put an item in your cart, then leave the site. You then see the item in numerous ads all over the place because Amazon is \u201cretargeting\u201d you to bring you back and get you to complete the purchase. Those ads are extremely effective because you\u2019ve already shown serious interest in the product. You can probably figure out why you are seeing certain ads on your<\/em> device, but when you look at the ads for other people<\/em>, retargeted ads generally look irrelevant because they\u2019re personalized.<\/p>\n \u00b7 Short attention spans and varied interests \u2013 If you go to the Huffington Post and click on an article in their politics section, on the right hand side you get recommendations for other articles on their site. Do this and you\u2019ll notice that you get some suggestions for other political articles but you also get suggestions from their entertainment, business and other categories on their site. News sites have figured out that people have short attention spans and varied interests so they show articles from other categories. It\u2019s the same with ads. Just because someone is using a fitness app doesn\u2019t mean that the best course of action is to pummel them with Nike ads.<\/p>\n \u00b7 Frequency capping \u2013 this is the ad tech term for only showing a given ad to a given user a certain number of times. This is done to increase performance of the ads. So early in an app session on the fitness app you might see some Nike ads, some Fitbit ads and some ads for other fitness apps. As you hang around longer and longer on the app (which developers of the app tend to do) those ads will hit their frequency caps and you\u2019ll start to see other ads that come from deeper in the ad pool.<\/p>\n \u00b7 Contextual relevance isn\u2019t the only targeting concern for advertisers \u2013 In fact, it\u2019s not even the primary concern when targeting ads. Advertisers can choose from a wide range of targeting options when they buy ads. They could target on demographic data like age, gender and location, on behavioral data such as the retargeting example above, or really any other data available (which is a vast pool). If an advertiser sees that you\u2019re in the small target audience they\u2019ve defined\u2014the 50 year old male model train enthusiast from El Paso, TX\u2014then they will show their ad and they won\u2019t really care that it happens to be inside a fitness app because that dude is hard to find.<\/p>\n That\u2019s hardly an exhaustive list but it\u2019s enough to give you an idea of why your ads don\u2019t appear relevant to your app. What you\u2019re really looking for is good-looking, high-quality ads that detract as little as possible from your user experience. You can block a few categories to make sure no ads appear that are offensive in some way. But aside from that you should let your ad network\u2014or better yet your SSP\u2014do what they need to do in order to make you the most money from your ad space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One question that I hear from developers is about the type of ads they see delivered in their apps from ad networks. The ads they see are often not really relevant to the content of the app, which seems like a huge miss when the app has a well-defined theme. 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