In this post, I want to write about the bidding system for mobile advertisements. This Bidding System is responsible for the CPC you'll get as a publisher.

As you all know, if someone wants to run an ad campaign he has to set a budget and a minimum bid price (per click).

Lets compare that to the more established (and well known) system of website advertisement, where everything works a bit different.

In the web, Advertisers are bidding for keywords, so they compete directly with other advertisers for adspace targeted to a specific keyword (and more, but lets stick with the keyword).
So if many people want to show an ad for the keyword "mouse" the bid (and also the CPC) will climb up.

In the end it is all about offer and demand. High demand and low offer leads to high CPC and vice versa.

In the world of mobile advertising, there are no keywords .. so ad spaces on mobile apps are not well targeted for any specific user base or keyword. Actually only the category can be used to subselect your ads.

So while on the web advertisers do compete against each others - on mobile sector, they only(!) compete against av available ad space.

So the more ad space is available the lower is the competition for advertisers and the lower is the CPC. Admob for example does say, that they also do some sort of evaluation for every ad space .. not sure if that is true and how it works.

So, what can we learn from that facts? Easy: Stop wasting impressions!
If you set your refresh rate to 30 seconds (instead of 120) you will flood the market with available ad space, so overall CPC is going DOWN

For every app, there is an ideal refresh rate. goal is to get the best CTR .. that doesn't mean to get the highest CTR - hard to describe - it has to be the right one, the goal should be to not waste too much impressions. There is no formula working for every app out there.

Still not proofed is, that the CTR of your ad space has any direct influence on the CPC you'll get. Too much noise in the stats to make a clear conclusion about it.

But as long as publishers flooding the market with 30 second refreshs and a CTR