Publishing

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Learn more about campaign types ▶

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• There might be a delay in your dashboard’s analytics. The internet is a series of tubes and sometimes they get clogged. Please wait 24 hours for data to update.
• Use named locations to place your ads closer to bootup or in other effective spots to increase the likelihood of your users seeing them.

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• There might be a delay in your dashboard’s analytics. The internet is a series of tubes and sometimes they get clogged. Please wait 24 hours for data to update.
• Your advertisers are running CPI or CPC campaigns. Only CPM or CPCV campaigns earn you revenue based on impressions. Learn more ▶
• Try targeting your audience better to maximize your impressions and convert more players.
• Use named locations to place your ads in more effective spots that will improve user experience and increase the likelihood of players clicking through.

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• Try new campaigns with different ad types that engage more players.
• If you are targeting specific countries in your campaign, make sure the countries you’re targeting don’t have low fill rates.
• Make sure your device targeting and OS targeting aren’t too restrictive.
• If you’re running multiple campaigns, set your video campaigns to the highest campaign priority.
• Use named locations to show different ad campaigns at different points in your game and match the right ad with the right player at the right time.
• Optimize your publishing campaign to target users more effectively and maximize your potential earnings.
• Start an advertising campaign to acquire new users.

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Go to your campaign’s advanced settings and change the maximum ads shown per user.

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Fill rate is the ratio of how many requested ads were actually delivered.

• Fill rate percentage = (ads delivered / ads requested) × 100
• Fill rate depends on how many advertising campaigns are running on Chartboost’s network at that given time.
• Fill rate can also be affected by targeting settings in your campaign (e.g. location, devices, exclusion lists), connectivity issues, timeouts, download performance, and Chartboost’s ad server logic.
• If you’re in a country with low fill rate, you may face fill rate issues when trying to serve impressions.

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Go to the Publishing Overview in your dashboard. ▲ Back to top

Learn about payment terms & dates ▶ ▲ Back to top

After our system retrieves a pool of advertising campaigns that match your publishing campaign targeting conditions, it serves your game an ad from the best-performing campaign, as defined by eCPM. In the Chartboost network, eCPM is a combination of an advertising campaign’s install rate (IR), clickthrough rate (CTR), and bid, which reflects the overall competitiveness of the campaign. ▲ Back to top

Because our network is dynamic, with new developers join every day, it’s difficult to predict. That said, we can work with you to optimize your campaigns, and you can use your account’s reporting tools to identify trends over time. ▲ Back to top

Before your publishing campaign starts delivering clicks or installs at higher volumes, you may notice that your campaign analytics show some number of clicks, but no revenue. This is completely normal: Because a large majority of Chartboost advertisers bid for installs – not clicks – your earnings will likely remain low until your campaigns start delivering more installs. From the campaign analytics page, you can see a report that breaks down your earnings by games you helped advertise. Just select the publishing campaign(s) in question, group by app, and refresh the table – you’ll get a TSV download (note that the file will have a .csv extension) with the information in the Money Earned column (and remember that values there will be 30% lower than the advertiser’s actual bid, to account for our portion of the revenue). Also note the difference between All Installs and Installs Delivered:

• All Installs is the number of devices that have installed your app for the first time (this is based on when we first receive an initialization call from your game), and often includes organic installs not received via Chartboost advertising campaigns
• Installs Delivered is the number of times your players clicked an ad, installed the promoted app, then booted up the game; it’s also a key metric to keep an eye on as a publisher

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eCPM is a key indicator of your campaigns’ performance. On the publishing side, eCPM represents the estimated revenue you’d bring in if your game delivered 1000 impressions for a certain advertising campaign; over time our ad-server filters out advertising apps that have low eCPMs to make room for higher-quality ads. More optimization information; app-filtering instructions After our system retrieves a pool of advertising campaigns that match the targeting conditions you set, it serves your app an ad from the best-performing campaign. We measure performance with the eCPM metric, ordinarily defined as the effective cost per thousand impressions served. But because Chartboost advertisers bid per click or install (instead of per impression), Chartboost eCPM is a combination of an advertising campaign’s Install Rate (IR), Click-Through-Rate (CTR), and bid that reflects the overall competitiveness of the campaign. (On the publishing side, eCPM represents the estimated revenue you’d receive if your game delivered 1000 impressions for a given advertising campaign. It’s a key performance indicator, but a publisher’s eCPM is not used by our system to match advertising campaigns with publishing apps.) ▲ Back to top

Chartboost does not support incentivized clicks or installs. For more information, refer to our Terms and Conditions. ▲ Back to top

If you have multiple campaigns running in a single game, you can use the Campaign Logic section to adjust each campaign’s priority:

This setting controls the order in which impressions will be served when more than one campaign is running in a given app. If you find that Game X never seems to deliver impressions from lower-priority campaigns, start by checking the list of campaigns it’s publishing; you can get to this list by switching to the game with the app switcher, expanding Campaigns in the left-side nav bar, then clicking Publishing:

Once you’re there and can see all the campaigns running in the game, try to imagine how an actual player would interact with them. If your game only occasionally calls for an interstitial, it’s very possible that users would never have the chance to advance past the higher-priority campaigns to see your lower-priority ads. To drive more traffic to your lower-priority campaigns, you should either bump them up in priority or decrease the number of impressions served by higher-priority ones. To accomplish the latter, consider turning off higher-priority campaigns at some locations to allow lower-priority campaigns to pick up the slack:

In the screenshot above, the campaign will not serve impressions at the Default location. For more in-depth information about priorities, see our FAQ here. ▲ Back to top

You may notice that your game delivers installs for some advertised apps without resulting in any earned revenue. This can happen for a few different reasons:

• The game your player installed was one of your own, advertised via a cross-promotion campaign
• The installed game was promoted by an advertiser who bid on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-completed-video (CPCV) basis, with the conversion occurring on a different day than the respective click or completed video. In this case you’ll see revenue for the click on the day it occurs, but no revenue for a conversion that can occur up to 21 days later.

For a clearer picture of revenue earned through conversions, you can click the Device Installs button on the Campaign Analytics page to download a report that shows the cost_value of each install:

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Here’s how to figure out which apps to filter using Microsoft Excel:

• Go to the Campaign Analytics panel in your dashboard.
• Select Campaigns ▼ from the dropdown under Filter By Campaign Or App.
• Use the text field to search for and select the campaign you want to analyze.
• Select a timeframe from the Time Range dropdown. We recommend Last 7 Days.
• Under the Group By dropdown, change Campaign ▼ to App ▼
• Click the refresh button to generate your report.
• Click the download button to export your data as a TSV file. Learn more about report formatting ▶
• Open the TSV file in Microsoft Excel.
• Select all of the data in the sheet, then click Data > Pivot Table from the top menu.
• Add To App Name to Row Labels. Add Sum of Impressions, Sum of Clicks, Sum of Installs, and Sum of Money Earned to Values.

• Calculate the eCPM in column F using the formula =E5/B5 * 1000 in cell F5, then extending that formula into the rest of the column. You can also format this whole column as currency to help with readability.
• eCPM is the most important, but you may also want to consider the click-through rate (clicks/impressions) and the install rate (installs/clicks). Not all apps track installs, so don’t be alarmed if some show 0 installs.
• Your average overall eCPM will be at the bottom right of your new table. Copy this pivot table into another worksheet and sort by eCPM to easily see which apps have the lowest relative eCPM and should be filtered from campaigns.
• If you’re thinking about filtering an app, consider the share of impressions it delivers for your app or receives in your app. For example, an app might be slightly below your average eCPM but serving a large percentage of your impressions; you may not want to exclude this app from your campaign. If you filter too many impressions, you might have problems filling your ad inventory. On the other hand, it’s probably not worth filtering a whole bunch of apps with only a handful of impressions.
• Once you’ve figured out which apps to filter, click on the two links below to learn how to filter them from your campaigns.

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More to explore…

• Filtering apps from publishing campaigns
• Filtering apps from advertising campaigns

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Let us know! Please include the name and ID of the app you need removed. ▲ Back to top

Because things change often in the network, we recommend removing filters every few weeks, reassessing which games offer low eCPMs, then excluding that updated list. You may be surprised at the difference between the two groups! ▲ Back to top