Steady App Monetization Growth for Delight Room in Partnership with Pangle

South Korean app publisher Delight Room is best known for their hugely popular morning wake-up app, Alarmy. Downloaded by over 50 million users globally, the Delight Room team has made it their mission with the app to: “Deliver a successful morning to people around the world, every day.”

The app is widely used in the US, Japan, and Korea and is making in-roads into countries like Russia and India. With their gaze set on expanding their global reach, Delight Room was pleased to add a partnership with Pangle to their strategy for Alarmy.

Securing Ad Revenue in a Shifting Industry

A significant recent change for the mobile app industry has been the rollout of iOS 14/14.5 and the impact on data collection and the use of Identity for Advertisers (IDFA). Like many publishers, Delight Room initially anticipated a large drop in eCPMs as users were now asked to “opt-in” for advertising.

“We decided to try and get ahead of the curve with it,” the company says. “With iOS 14, we were already using prompts to explain to users why they were suddenly being asked to opt-in. We also decided to be very honest about the fact that the data is used for advertising purposes and that the revenue we make from that helps to run the app.”

The company worked hard to create opt-in prompt dialogs that would get users to agree. After initial rates of around 30%, they managed to boost their opt-ins to 52%.

This exercise showed the Delight Room team that users pay close attention to the information supplied by those types of prompts. Getting it just right means the difference between users opting in and publishers trying to sell IDFA-less ad inventory.

Given that this shift is likely to occur for Android within the next year or two, the lesson will likely provide lasting value.

Optimizing Ad Placement Strategies

The ad formats Delight Room currently uses are banner and native ads. They note that banner ads are useful for stable eCPMs and fill rate, while native ads provide a better user experience (UX).

Even though UX considerations are crucial, Delight Room found that very few demand partners provided native ads. As a result, they opted to swap in larger-scale images for banners to increase fills.

To maintain optimal UX in the areas where it’s most crucial, the company says they still use native ads in places like the app’s home screen, where UX matters more than ad revenue.

Pangle’s expertise with these and other ad formats means the company can add extra value for partners like Delight Room when optimizing their ad and monetization strategy.

Delight Room notes: “Pangle has been really supportive. Even after integration, they continue to provide guidance and suggestions for how we can improve monetization performance.”

Better Performance With a Hybrid Strategy

Delight Room’s model for ad placements is a hybrid method combining traditional waterfall and in-app bidding.

The company notes that their waterfall strategy involves three tiers of ad placements to give their demand partners multiple points of target eCPM. This strategy allows them to optimize within tiers and increase the competitiveness of ad placements.

In addition, the company uses Pangle in-app bidding and says the results have been impressive.

“Pangle’s performance in bidding looks great so far, especially in terms of efficiency,” Delight Room says.

“Pangle has the most wins and impressions among our top bidders. Pangle also tends to have a higher click-through rate (CTR) when compared to other demand partners. This indicates that Pangle is bidding very efficiently and showing ads to users at the right moment when they’re likely to perform optimally.”

Bolstering Delight Room’s Ad Revenue

With all the demand partners Delight Room works with the company can find it tricky to ascertain exactly how much revenue is coming from a particular partner. Even so, once the company integrated the Pangle SDK, Pangle’s initial performance caught their attention.

“We’ve been working with Pangle for around six months. Once everything was integrated and we’d managed the challenges around iOS 14.5, we could really start to look at performance,” they continue.

“The starting performance was good compared to the other companies we worked with when they first started. In May, Pangle’s revenue portion of our entire ad revenue was already impressive, especially considering how many demand partners (around 18 integrated at the moment) we work with. In June, they doubled their performance. We’re assuming that it will increase even more now that we also have Pangle integrated into in-app bidding.”

Delight Room has also noticed an increase in impressions and that Pangle is taking over more of its traffic share. The publisher anticipates that Pangle’s portion of their ad revenue could soon reach 10%, a figure they’ve achieved only with top app monetization partners.

Partnering With Pangle Around the Globe

Delight Room has already integrated Pangle in international markets and looks forward to seeing the partnership increase in value month-on-month. As part of their strategy for Alarmy, the company is looking to expand on its presence in Asia and further afield. They see Pangle as a dedicated partner in that process.

Sean Lee, Business Development Lead at Delight Room says: “Pangle has been an important and valuable partner for us so far. Their app monetization advice and ongoing support with optimizing performance has been great. They’re so professional and quick to respond. We’re really looking forward to working with them as we expand into new markets.”

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