In-game promotions have been a hot topic lately as we’ve seen a flurry of data from companies such as Peanut Labs providing best practices for publishers on more intricate use of offers to increase revenues. Adding to this knowledge base is Offerpal Media with their newest white paper released this morning that advises publishers on how to use in-flash, email and display based promotions to increase their offer-based revenue significantly. Offerpal has provided helpful white papers in the past, such as their white paper on virtual currency monetization that was published in Dec of 2008 and their latest is filled with good advice.

In a nutshell, players engaged in games may not find the offer wall, which is to the publishers detriment since traditional offer walls remain a crucial source of monetization revenue. To counter the staggeringly low fraction of users that find offer walls (approx. 10 percent), offer companies urge the use of in-game promotions. An ‘in-game’ promotion is designed to engage and direct users within the game, through some sort of pop-up and direct them to the offer wall where they can fill out surveys and offers, watch videos or perform some other action in exchange for virtual currency.

The white paper, which discussed best practices for developers and publishers to increase monetization using in-game promotions, revealed some interesting statistics:

·   Participating developers experienced a more than 3x increase in offer-based advertising revenue versus normal daily revenue
·   93% of the users who completed ad offers through the in-game promotions were new users who had never taken part in an offer in that game before
·   Within the first week after completing an in-game promotional offer, over 10% of these newly monetized users had returned to fill out another offer or make a direct payment
·   The effective CPM rate was $2.03, compared to typical CPM rates in the range of $0.10 to $1.00.

Offerpal’s advice comes amidst an evolving climate of virility, where the scarcity of calls-to-action drives publishers to be cautious about how they use their app’s real-estate. Players, already plagued by a deteriorating attention span and on the verge of a skinnerian chasm, may chide the use of pop-ups and special notifications. In-game flash promotions and branded virtual goods, if integrated seamlessly, could prove to be less intrusive and help developers out.

Offerpal’s content marketing strategy seems to be paying off as they have engaged over 225 million consumers across 2000 publishers since their launch in 2007.

You can check out Offerpal Media’s site here, and the white paper here.