FAQ

Publishing

What is “placement type” when creating a campaign? 🔗

Campaigns on the Chartboost network are divided into two categories: interstitial and rewarded. Interstitial campaigns show any static, video, or playable ad. Rewarded campaigns incentivize users to interact with a video or playable ad in exchange for in-game currency, power-ups, cheat codes, etc.

How can I optimize my campaigns to maximize revenue? 🔗

Learn about campaign optimization

Why do I have many bootups but no impressions? 🔗

  • 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 the data to update.
  • Use Ad Locations to place your ads closer to bootup or in other effective spots to increase the likelihood of your users seeing them.

Why can’t I add a new campaign? 🔗

Please note that you cannot add a new publishing campaign until your app has been approved for publishing. See our Publisher App Review process for more information.

Why are my apps greyed out while creating a publishing campaign? 🔗

Please note that until your app is enabled for publishing, you will not be able to select it in the Select app(s) section of your publishing campaign. It can take a couple of days to have your app approved. If you don’t hear back from us within a week, you can contact us.

Learn about the publisher app review process

Why is my revenue low even though I have lots of impressions? 🔗

  • 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 the data to update.
  • Your advertisers are running CPI campaigns. Only CPM campaigns earn you revenue based on impressions. Learn more
  • Try targeting your audience better to maximize your impressions and convert more players.
  • Use Ad Locations to place your ads in more effective spots that will improve user experience and increase the likelihood of players clicking through.

Why are my impressions low? How do I get more traffic? 🔗

Why are there earning discrepancies between App and Campaign Analytics when I use Banners? 🔗

Because your Banner analytics are only displayed in the App Analytics section of the Chartboost platform, your earnings will not match between App and Campaign analytics. Your total earnings are correctly displayed in the App Analytics and your interstitial & rewarded earnings are displayed in the campaign analytics.

How do I limit the number of times I show ads to my players? 🔗

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

How do I control the audio in my ads? 🔗

The template from Chartboost ads already includes a MUTE button on video ads which gives your players the power to control the audio on their end. This button is usually on the top right section of your ads. If you wish to manually set the audio behavior (muted or unmuted) you can do this by using the Chartboost SDK method setMuted.

What is fill rate? 🔗

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 a low fill rate, you may face fill rate issues when trying to serve impressions.

How do I see my earnings? 🔗

Go to the Publishing Overview in your Chartboost platform.

When will I get paid? How will I get paid? Why didn’t I get paid? 🔗

Learn about payment terms & dates

How does your system decide which ads to serve in my app? 🔗

After our system retrieves a pool of advertising campaigns that match your campaign targeting conditions, it then 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.

Can you estimate how many clicks or installs my app will deliver with a certain bid floor? 🔗

Because our network is dynamic, with new developers joining 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.

Why am I not making money even though users are clicking on my ads? 🔗

Before your 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

What is eCPM? How does it affect my publishing performance? 🔗

eCPM is a key indicator of your campaign’s 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.

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.

Does Chartboost support incentivized installs? 🔗

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

Why don’t all the converted installs that I deliver earn me money? 🔗

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-installs (CPI) 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.

How do I know which games to filter from my campaigns? 🔗

We highly recommend letting Chartboost decide which apps appear in your campaign. Follow these instructions only if you need to filter apps for business reasons (e.g. competing or similar apps).

How to figure out which apps to filter using Microsoft Excel:

  • Go to the Campaign Analytics panel in your Chartboost platform.
  • 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 extend 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.

We recommend that you do not exceed 1,500 apps filtered in a single campaign.

Any changes made may take up to 30 minutes to go live.

If you filter out an app and a user has already cached an ad for that app on their device, that ad can still be shown for up to 24 hours.

What if I can’t find the app I want to filter? 🔗

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

How long should I keep filters applied? 🔗

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!