Over the last few weeks, we’ve begun communicating our vision and roadmap through our blog posts. As we continue building a leading platform for mobile developers and buyers, we want to continue this conversation.
We appreciate the level of excitement, transparency, and openness MoPub publishers, DSPs, and agency partners have provided. Your feedback has helped us understand the MoPub features you have come to love and rely on over the years, and this insightful dialogue has led us to add new features to MAX. We believe these additions to our platform will be highly beneficial for our publisher and advertiser partners and the growth of their businesses in 2022 and beyond. Our account teams will make this transition as seamless as possible.
The following are live on MAX as of this week:
AppLovin Exchange (“ALX”): The transition of DSPs from the MoPub Marketplace to the AppLovin Exchange has started. All MoPub DSPs are on track to be integrated in early Q1. We are actively making enhancements to bid stream data to help our programmatic buyers transition with ease (e.g. IDFV, viewability signals, and deal IDs). These additions will be available on a rolling basis over the next few weeks. DSPs should work with their AppLovin account teams to provide feedback on the additional features they want to see. On the supply front, mobile publishers and developers should update their website’s hosted app-ads.txt file with the AppLovin app-ads.txt entries to take full advantage of the top DSP partners that we’re onboarding behind the scenes. In early January, we will add Exchange Analytics reporting to provide further visibility into buyer performance based on the ads displayed.
Universal Creative Reporting. Ad Review creative reporting provides full transparency into all the ads running in your apps. A detailed breakdown includes the names of the ad networks, DSPs, and advertisers for each impression.
Ad Review Banner Support. Ad Review detects banner creatives and the malicious auto-redirects running in your apps across all demand sources. With MAX’s Ad Review, problematic ads are caught automatically to protect your user experience. Learn more on how MAX’s Ad Review can help you build a superior user experience.
Native Ad Format Support.MAX mediation now supports the native ad format.This initial beta version supports common templatized use cases and enables access to our full suite of SDK-based network partners in addition to AppLovin Exchange DSPs. The next iteration of the native product will be available in the first SDK release in the first week of January 2022, and it will be compatible with the advanced implementations supported by MoPub. After the early January SDK release, our documentation page will have detailed instructions on different developer use cases, and the AppLovin and MoPub support teams will provide guidance for its integration.
Built-in GDPR Consent Flow. For developers that don’t want to build their own GDPR consent flow, there’s now an option to use the built-in flow within MAX.
In addition to the MAX features our team has released publicly, we will also make the following features available to select developers in an early alpha release. Eligible publishers can take a more active role in the iterative development process for these features. Reach out to your AppLovin account team to see if you qualify to be a part of the alpha release. These include:
Ad Review User Journey:Provides transparency into the ads seen by your app users and their ad journey. Trace down the source of problematic ads that your users are reporting via support tickets and email the partner in the same dashboard. Official launch is slated for early Q1 2022.
Rewarded Interstitial Ads. This new full-screen ad format allows you to offer rewards without requiring the user to opt-in. This early version includes demand from AppLovin, Facebook, and AdMob. More SDK networks and AppLovin Exchange support will be added in Q1 2022.
We are actively working on the following features for our buyers and publishers that will be supported with the first SDK release in the first week of January 2022. We recommend that developers make sure to update to this version of the SDK. Our documentation page will be updated after the SDK release. Exchange buyers should adapt the relevant spec changes to benefit from these features:
Direct-Sold Ad Campaigns with Audience Targeting: Monetize with direct-sold campaigns and target audiences with your first-party data (e.g. age, gender, location data, interest, custom keywords). These campaigns will support guaranteed, backfill, and cross-promo campaign types.
Custom Networks: Work with any server-side tag-based network or SDK-based network to monetize your inventory. Developers will be able to write their own custom adapters or leverage third-party supported integrations.
Brand Safety: We are working with publishers to enforce app-ads.txt adoption, adding support for sellers.json and integrating with the IAB’s Open Measurement SDK for passing enhanced viewability signals in the bid stream. We are moving at full speed so our brands and advertisers can transact in a brand-safe environment.
Private Marketplace: Transact with any of the AppLovin Exchange DSPs through private marketplace deals inclusive of a single app-based deal or multiple apps, depending on your needs. We will continue to iterate on our programmatic offering to provide a full suite of solutions for buyers and publishers with products like Programmatic Guaranteed Deals, curated Inventory Packages, and deal discovery tools. MoPub and AppLovin demand teams are here to help you ramp-up and transact as efficiently as possible.
Open-Source Network Mediation Adapters and New Public SDK APIs: These adapters allow developers to troubleshoot and integrate ad networks with greater flexibility. New public SDK APIs will be added to provide transparency into ad responses with access to ad network credentials, errors, and real-time latency measurements. Developers can access the data in real-time, set up alerts, and optimize as needed using their own reporting tools. A dedicated report for latency measurement will be available in late Q1 in the MAX dashboard.
Many of the top buyers and mobile developers have already started actively transitioning to MAX. Our teams are ready to provide guidance through migration planning. Please checkout our integration checklist. We have built tools to automate the waterfall transition from your existing mediation platform. Please contact our team directly for support. In parallel, we are able to provide recommendations on user acquisition strategies and waterfall optimization recommendations that can help drive incremental revenue during this next phase of growth.
We believe these updates strengthen our partnership with current supply and demand partners on MAX, and the new publishers, mobile developers and advertisers we welcome to our platform from all verticals. As we continue to build and launch new features, please check out our blog for updates and more information.
