Table of Contents

• Mobile adoption
• Mobile growth explained
• Mobile advertising growth
• EXADS Mobile Ad Server Management Experience: Ad Formats
• EXADS Mobile Ad Server Management: Benefits
• EXADS Mobile App Developer and Publisher Experience
• EXADS Mobile Advertiser Experience
• Conclusion

Monetizing an ad server that targets only mobile devices is a very lucrative business model, especially when you see the potential for global growth within the mobile market. This article will answer questions like what is a mobile ad server and what key features you should look for. We will cover market statistics for mobile adoption, mobile advertising industry growth and the benefits of using EXADS to build your own mobile ad server. 

Mobile adoption

Smartphone and tablet mobile devices are essential for people around the world. According to Oberlo, smartphone adoption will continue to grow, with 2023 promising 6.8 billion people and 2027 growing to 7.7 billion people.

This growing smartphone adoption has allowed publishers and apps to become available to a growing number of users, enabling them to monetize more and more traffic sources. It also allows advertisers to target more end users with their offers, products, and services in order to grow their businesses. With mobile devices, a new lead is just one tap away. 

Mobile growth explained

Growth can be attributed to population increases and important market changes:

• The economic recovery following COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions.
• The permanent shift to hybrid working from both the office and home where mobile and desktop devices are being used in conjunction with each other to carry out tasks and take breaks.
• Consumers are spending more time with all forms of digital media on mobile devices including online shopping, product reviews and comparisons, entertainment, streaming, short form video, social media, games, dating, brand searches, etc. 
• Big growth in emerging markets. Statista states that there will be an increase in Smartphone adoption in LATAM from 69% in 2021 to 73% in 2025. For APAC, eMarketer predicts that the number of smartphone users in Southeast Asia will reach 326.3 million (88%) in 2022 and rise steadily to 90.1% by 2026.
• A survey by GSMA revealed that in Sub-Saharan Africa, 64% of the population were using smartphones in 2020, this is predicted to grow to 75% by 2025. 
• 5G smartphone shipments have seen a spike in demand, in fact, 47% of all technological devices are tipped to be 5G infused by the end of 2022, bringing the fifth generation of mobile connectivity into the mainstream.

Mobile advertising growth

According to the Internet Advertising Revenue Report, $7 in every $10 spent on online advertising is spent on mobile as advertisers tap into mobile conversions. The smaller screen real estate makes ads appear larger on the screen compared to desktop banners for example. And there are less of them, making mobile targeting especially competitive for advertisers, which drives higher eCPMs for mobile ad spots. With the ease of one click mobile payment options like Apple Pay, Google Pay, WeChat and Carrier Billing end users are one tap away from making a purchase.

All of these benefits of market growth, and greater mobile device engagement from end users make starting your own Mobile Ad Serving business an exciting business proposition.

EXADS Mobile Ad Server Management Experience: Ad Formats

In 2022 EXADS served 3.42 trillion impressions on mobile (9.37 billion daily) and on tablet 376 billion (1.03 billion daily). Because of the flexibility of EXADS white-label ad server platform, you can build your own branded mobile ad server easily and quickly. EXADS provides a large range of ad formats for mobile devices for mobile web and in app advertising. All ad formats are fully responsive and show perfectly across all mobile and tablet screens.

Display ad formats 

• Mobile Banners 300x100 and 300x250 static banner ads that contain an image and texts.
• Sticky Banners are able to ‘stick’ in several positions on a mobile screen. 
• Instant Message, typically a copy of the instant messenger chat box. This ad format appears to users by displaying a 300x250 on bottom center for mobile.

Native formats

• Native Recommendation widget, a fully customizable widget that displays a single or group of Native ads together. Each Native ad features an image and a short text: title and description.
• Native Exit widget, triggers when the end user's mouse moves outside the page as if exiting the site. Features a customizable group of Native ads.
• Native Interstitial, overlays the page with contextually relevant ads. A smooth transition from the side of the page is gentle on user experience and the unit can easily be dismissed. Frequency capping controls how often users will see the widget.

Multiformat ads 

• Multiformat ads allow ad zones to display either a Banner or Native ad, the format with the highest bid wins the zone. This ability to serve multiple formats can increase the number of eligible bids and generate higher revenues for a publisher’s impressions whilst giving advertisers access to previously unavailable inventory. If you have publishers interested in monetizing Banners and Native it is simple to create a Multi-Format ad zone and this is a great advantage for the publishers and advertisers in your network.

Push Notifications

• Push Notifications are sent to end users who have opted in to receive Push Notifications from a website or app. The format features an icon or image and text. Sent to opted in users to their mobile or tablet devices even when not browsing. 

Video ads

• In-Stream video ads play before a piece of video content plays (pre-roll), in the middle of a piece of video content (mid-roll) or after a piece of video content has ended (post roll)
• Outstream is a responsive video format that can be placed anywhere on a mobile site. It plays when more than 50% of it is revealed and can have a CTA added.
• Slider is a video format that slides in from the bottom right of a webpage once it has loaded. 
• Video Banners, display short video content.
• In Video Banners are a banner ad displayed as an overlay to a piece of video content, just like Youtube

Rich Media formats

• Mobile Fullpage Interstitial, a vertical ad that takes up the full mobile screen that can display static images or MP4 video ads, this ad displays landscape on tablets.
• Mobile Popunder, a full screen ad hidden behind the main browser window that appears when the user closes or minimizes it.

CPC (Cost per Click) only

• Direct Links from the Publisher’s site which can be Menu Tabs, Back Button Offers or Push Notifications.
• Email Clicks are ideal for Publishers and Email List Managers to monetize email traffic. Advertisers can send emails promoting their offers to opted in email lists.

EXADS Mobile Ad Server Management: Benefits

EXADS' mobile ad server for app developers, ad networks and publishers comes with a host of IAB industry standard features to monetize mobile advertising by serving ads to any mobile device, tablet and operating system: 

• Fully customizable Mobile ad server: EXADS ad serving solutions can be branded and fully customized to meet the requirements of your business. 
• Choice of mobile ad formats: Setting up your own ad server business can include EXADS full range of mobile ad formats or a selection of ad formats. For example maybe you just want to monetize video ads, or native ads, everything is possible with EXADS to help you focus your business. 
• Ad compliance: Through EXADS partnership with ad security and ad quality solution AdSecure, you will have an automated solution to be able to identify non-compliant ad creatives, potential malvertising threats or malicious code hidden within the ad supply chain. Additionally ad creatives can be scanned for poor visual quality or for being too heavy in weight. Once detected you can immediately stop those campaigns to protect your network and the end user. This allows for brand image protection as well as providing a great end user experience for ads.
• A self-service solution: You will be able to offer your app developers, publishers and advertisers a complete self-service solution, allowing app developers and publishers to create their own bespoke mobile ad zones and advertisers to create their own mobile ad campaigns using a large range of deep targeting options and additional tools such as dynamic keywords, emojis, automated bidding, variations and landing page traffic optimization algorithms to help advertisers generate a higher ROI. 
• Scalability: Our mobile ad server is completely scalable in order to grow your business, allowing you to create unlimited role-based self-serve accounts for your app developers, advertisers and publishers. Additionally our DSP also allows you to plug in your own programmatic mobile inventory to reach more advertisers.
• Customizable Dashboards: EXADS gives you fully customizable dashboards to analyze real-time and historical statistics across multiple dimensions to help you maximize your mobile ad serving revenues.
• Comprehensive financial management: Manage all your mobile ad server’s invoices and do mass payouts all in one place with EXADS financial management tools - we offer one of the most comprehensive lists of payment options for your clients, with options including Credit Card, SecurionPay, SafeCharge, Crypto and Paypal for advertisers, and Paxum, Crypto, Bitpay, Webmoney and WireTransfer for app developers and publishers. 
• Our data processing infrastructure: We have a robust infrastructure to handle massive amounts of data for every impression, click, action, bid, etc. by tracking and storing your data. To find out more, checkout our blog post Real Time Event Processing at Massive Scale. 
• 24/7 technical support: Our team of technical experts will offer you support and guidance as required. We also provide advanced documentation that is updated regularly and that can be shared with your app developers, publishers or advertisers.

So now let's look at the benefits for your app developer, publisher and advertiser clients when using EXADS as your white label mobile ad server.

EXADS Mobile App Developer and Publisher Experience

Here is an overview of what benefits are available using EXADS as a mobile ad server for app developers or a mobile ad server for publishers: 

• Easy to use: The EXADS self-service interface is extremely user friendly for both beginners and experienced clients. This is made possible through extensive research performed by our team of User Experience experts who have helped create a highly intuitive interface.
• Many monetization options: EXADS offers a large range of mobile ad formats. In fact you can still monetize video ad zones with our Outstream and Video Slider formats even if your mobile site or app doesn’t host video content. 
• Ad refresh: Ad refresh refreshes ads that are already displayed on a page without refreshing the page itself, which allows the display of more ads to the same user in a single session, therefore increasing publisher ad revenues.
• Greater reach: DSPs can plug into EXADS inventory to reach more advertisers to target your mobile ad zones.
• Beat AdBlockers: EXADS offers adblock circumvention tools that allow ads to be shown to end users even if they are using adblock software, allowing monetization of adblock traffic.
• Async fast loading: Publishers can use Asynchronous Tags which ensure that their mobile site's content will be able to load while the ads are loading. This increases performance and helps to boost Google rankings.
• Great end user experience: Finding the right balance between mobile ad performance and content requires testing across multiple GEOs. EXADS statistics allow you to test and find the perfect sweet spot. Additionally you can select what type of advertiser offers you want to show to your end users and block product types that are unsuitable for your audience.
• Keyword targeting: You can use Keywords related to specific content on your mobile website pages or app which will attract advertisers with specific products or offers related to the keywords you have added.  This means that advertisers interested in your keywords will be more interested in the ad zone, because their ad will be more contextually interesting to the end user. The advertiser’s offer will get more qualified clicks which increases the CTR for the ad zone and will bring you a higher eCPM.
• Mobile ad zone statistics: Our customizable dashboards will help you track the important KPIs for your business. The dashboards allow you to analyze a large range of dimensions to show real-time and historic data for each mobile ad zone in any GEO, in order to fine tune your mobile ad zones and pull performance reports. 

EXADS Mobile Advertiser Experience

Let's get an overview of the key features and performance tools for mobile advertisers:

• Ad formats: Our large range of mobile ad formats allow you many different creative options to promote your offers to mobile users. For example, video advertising on mobile is growing fast with the popularity of short video content apps like Instagram, TikTok, etc and EXADS offers three different video formats, video banners and rich media formats that show video content. Allowing you to use video creatives to gain higher conversions, Video and Rich Media ad formats have one of the highest CTRs of all mobile ad formats.
• Video advertising additional features: EXADS offers additional features for video formats to increase CTRs: our CTA feature allows advertisers to select from a range of predetermined short CTR messages that are displayed below the video ad. Our Friendly URL feature also allows advertisers to display in text form the URL of the landing page the end user will be taken if they click on the video ad, e.g. Fiat.com. This gives a higher CTR and brings quality leads because the end users knows exactly where clicking on the video ad will take them.
• Push Notification and Native advertising tools: EXADS platform also allows advertisers to use Emojis both in the Title and Description texts. These are hugely powerful and appeal to mobile users, especially to Millenials and Gen Z audiences. Additionally Emojis allow advertisers to explain their title and description using less characters by replacing words with Emojis. Dynamic keyword insertion: For more personalized marketing, advertisers can use dynamically changing texts within their Push and Native ad campaigns. This is a highly useful feature so that the end user feels like the ad is talking to them. So for example, using the dynamic token for {device} in the text: “Find out why this is the most popular game on {device}”, if the end user is viewing the ad on an iPhone 14 the text displayed to them would be “Find out why this is the most popular game on iPhone 14.” Keyword insertion language distribution: This takes dynamic keywords a step further by automatically translating the keyword insertion token into the following languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.
• Automated optimization tools: EXADS platform provides a range of automation tools to help advertisers save time by automating certain optimization features to generate a higher ROI. The Bidder: Allows for automatic bidding optimization which works by intelligently adjusting an advertiser's bid for mobile ad zones according to how many conversions are received, and blocks those ad zones that don’t convert. Additionally rule blocking can be set to block under-performing browsers, countries, devices, languages, mobile carriers, operating systems, sites, and zones automatically according to rules set within the Bidding Algorithm. Variations and Landing Page optimization: These tools allow the advertiser to select from several traffic distribution algorithms, so for example, the best performing Landing Page or Native variation will always receive the most traffic.
• Advanced targeting: EXADS platform offers a large range of targeting options for mobile advertisers in order to fine tune reach. Of prime importance to mobile advertisers are wifi, carrier, OS, Apple, Android. In fact advertisers can even target specific devices by manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, etc. Other targeting features include: site, app, contextual, keyword, language, GEO, region, browser, IP range, frequency capping, day-parting, etc.
• IP ranges: Advertisers can integrate the targeting of their own IP Range lists and the IP Ranges of the ad network or publisher. By targeting IP addresses, advertisers remove the need to utilize cookies and can build up their own IP Range lists even further. 
• Carrier Billing integration: Advertisers can target hundreds of carriers globally with the possibility of using carrier billing. Carrier billing is achieved through a direct integration into the billing system of a mobile operator, allowing a charge to be placed on a phone bill. It allows for 1 click payments without the need for asking end users for credit card information for ease of payment flow. Carrier billing is very popular with Tier 3 GEOs.
• Conversion Tracking: EXADS offers two types of Conversion Tracking: S2S (server to server) conversion tracking API and Pixel Tracking. In addition to being able to use third party conversion tracking tools like Voluum, Cake, etc, EXADS offers a free, highly effective Conversion Tracking Tool. Used in conjunction with The Bidder tool, it enables advertisers to choose a conversion value while creating or editing a conversion goal and then monitoring conversions through a detailed report on each of the conversions within the admin panel's Statistics and Campaigns List pages. Check our Case Study to see how advertisers can use The Bidder and our Conversion Tracking feature to monitor campaign results. Some of the key benefits are:
• Track each of the conversions with an accurate monetary value (Revenue).
• Obtain a more detailed report through the metrics: Conversion Rate, Profit, Revenue, ROI.
• The Profit and ROI metrics will give a good insight about each conversion goal.
• Based on these metrics, advertisers can adjust any conversion goals that are underperforming.
• Mobile campaign statistics: EXADS provides customizable dashboards for showing real-time and historical data for each campaign, that are all customizable with different dimensions. This allows for quick analysis of how each campaign is performing in order to make immediate decisions on campaign optimization.

Conclusion

Whether you are an ad network, app developer, publisher or advertiser, EXADS white-label Mobile ad serving solution has a large range of industry leading features to get your Mobile ad server set up quickly and customized to your needs. Want to build your own mobile ad server? For more information, get in touch with us to discuss how you can take your Mobile advertising monetization to the next level!