Most of you will most likely know the meanings of eCPM (Clicks per thousand) and CPC (Cost per Click)

For developers the eCPM means nearly nothing, while the CPC means everything. It is the money you get per single click. In legal scenarios you always will have a CTR of abround 1-3% CTR (click rate per impression). Everything else is unnatural. Your CTR SHOULD be at around 2%. While there will be differences in different games or apps, 2.5% seems to be a natural maximum.

And because I know that, admob for example will know that even better, so if you got a CTR of over 5% you will most likely be kicked out because of click fraud :-)

In fact it is more complicated than that because there are some more factors like the overall ad refresh rate which can be zero, so you would get a very high CTR which is not click fraud, but advertisers are able to track that, so don't get afraid.

Whatever. The reason of this article is another one. What is better: High impressions and lower CTR or lower Impressions and higher CTR. That was always a question for myself and because I am in the lucky position to track it, I can talk about it.

The following will vary for different games/apps and also may vary for different ad providers, so I am talking about admob and my two games Robo Miner and Worm Puncher.

Robo Miner has a more or less high impression rate with low CTR and Worm Puncher, does mostly not refresh at all, so it has a low Impression Rate and a high CTR.

I have to say, that Robo Miner has 20 times the impressions of Worm Puncher, so that may be another reason in terms of available ad inventory, but I cannot proof it.

My sense of ad placement is that, that a high CTR ad space is worth more money than a low CTR ad space. So high CTRs are the way to go, to get high paying ads displayed.

As it seems, it is true, because Worm Puncher does get 8 times the CPC as Robo Miner does. So the only difference is a) the CTR and b) overall impressions.

That will lead to the assumption, that if you want a high revenue per click, you should go for a low CTR. The reason for that is logical and can be easily calculated (by admob).

A well seen (therefore well clicked) ad space will be of more value than a not well seen (or very rare clicked) one. Advertisers want to get attention.

A player on the other side will not play your game just to click on ads, so you should present a player one and only one ad in a long period of time. Sooner or later it will be recognized by the player and will be clicked if the ad is interesting.

An ad, which has a low price to show will be naturally less interesting than an ad which is high priced. So you want the high priced high quality ads - those ads are fighting for the best place to show, they don't want to be shown on places where they are not seen.

Admob wants to get their cut, so admob is also interested in placing high paying ads in well clicked (well seen) placed to get their advertisers the best experience possible.

I watched my numbers over several weeks did some experiments and there is always one result: A better CTR does result in a better CPC.

Let's give me a number:

High Impressions, Low CTR = 0.017 CPC
Low Impressions, High CTR = 0.043 CPC

That does not leave much room for interpretation, so if you want to make money, you should go for high CTR instead of High Impressions.

So that is proofed - at least for admob :-)

For games, it is very simple: During a game (which may be timed) noone will click the banner - never!. Time to watch an ad is between levels, when leaving the game and such things, so THAT should be your point of manually refresh your ad. Always look for a reason to refresh your ad - just refreshig every 60 seconds is just useless, because there is simply no reason to do so :-)

Actually doing no refresh at all is also a bad idea, because you may get a bad (low quality) ad which will not be clicke djust because it is an uninteresting ad - so yous SHOULD refresh, but only if there is a reason to do so - like when starting the next level, before leaving the game or when starting a new game or between game pauses.

Think about it, it's just logical for everyone and the best for advertisers and publishers at the same time.