Your Ad Revenue Is Leaking

Ad monetization expert Kelly Kang shares her framework to find the hidden leaks, fix your stack, and reclaim your margins.

Your Ad Revenue Is Leaking. Ad Expert Kelly Kang Explains How to Fix It.

It’s one of the most common frustrations in game development today: your traffic is growing, your DAU is climbing, but your ad revenue is stubbornly flat. You’re doing everything right, yet the numbers don’t scale. This isn’t just a feeling; it’s a reality for countless studios getting squeezed in an increasingly complex ad monetization landscape.

To get to the bottom of this, we sat down with veteran ad monetization consultant Kelly Kang, whose experience spans from casual puzzle games at Big Fish to social casino at Aristocrat. She provides a clear, no-nonsense framework for not just plugging the leaks in your revenue, but building a robust strategy from the ground up.

Here are the key takeaways from our conversation:

• Your Real Margin Isn’t What’s in Your Contract. The biggest pain point is shrinking margins, but not for the reason you think. Beyond the agreed-upon rev-share, hidden “tech fees” and other costs can mean you’re taking home less than 50% of the ad spend, even on a 70/30 deal. The focus shouldn’t be on negotiating percentages, but on the final net dollar amount you receive.

• Stop Obsessing Over ARPDAU and CPM. While important, these metrics don’t tell the whole story. Kelly advises focusing on deeper player experience metrics: Ad Engagement (are players opting in?), Ad Session Length (are ads driving users away or keeping them in the game?), and Impression Depth (are players seeing one ad or multiple ads per session?). These KPIs reveal the true health of your ad integration.

• For a New Game, Product Comes Before Tech. The most common mistake is treating ad monetization as an afterthought. Before you even think about choosing a mediation platform, you must first define your in-game ad formats and their impact on your game economy. Choosing your ad networks before you know whether you’re using rewarded video, offer walls, or interstitials is a recipe for disaster, as not all networks excel in every format.

• “Yelling at Your Partner” Doesn’t Work Anymore. The old-school method of calling your ad network rep to demand better performance is dead. With over 95% of deals now being programmatic, the key is to collaborate with partners to gain insights and establish fair, data-driven competition through your mediation platform. The machine has already won; your job is to provide it with the correct inputs.

This is one of the most practical, no-fluff conversations we’ve had on building a modern ad monetization stack. For the full deep-dive, watch our complete discussion with Kelly Kang below:

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Anchor

Speakers:

• Joseph Kim. CEO at Lila Games.

• Kelly Kang. Co-founder at Game Plan.

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The Day One Audit: A 4-Point Checklist for Your Admon Stack

When Kelly takes on a new client, she runs a systematic audit that uncovers the most significant gaps and opportunities. It’s a framework any studio can use to assess its own strategy, focusing on four key areas.

1. Mediation: Header Bidding vs. The Waterfall

The default advice for lean teams is to start with in-app header bidding—it’s dramatically less operational work than a manual waterfall. However, the most significant insight here is that you shouldn’t treat it as a permanent, “set it and forget it” solution. As your game scales, you can begin A/B testing a hybrid model.

Kelly Kang: “Not all ad networks are better in in-app header bidding. Meaning if you change them to a manual waterfall...and give them the rate...they come in a lot higher than when you give them the freedom of to pick whichever user they can come in as.”

This is a critical nuance. Some networks perform better when given specific price points in a waterfall. In the full discussion, Kelly outlines the specific signals—like a dramatic DAU shift or a major advertiser budget in Q4—that tell you when it’s time to start experimenting with a hybrid approach.

2. Data: Measuring What Actually Matters

Are you tracking the right things? Moving beyond surface-level revenue metrics is crucial to determining whether your ads are helping or hurting your business. Kelly recommends tracking:

• Ad Engagement: What percentage of your players are actively choosing to watch an ad? If a new placement is launched, is it hitting a 70% engagement rate or a 20% rate?

• Ad Session Length: After an ad is shown, does the user’s time in-app increase or decrease? This directly answers whether your ads are supporting or killing retention.

• Impression Depth: Are users seeing just one ad, or are they reaching the third, fourth, or fifth ad placement you’ve designed? This metric shows how “sticky” your ad loop is.

3. Placements & Frequency: Personalizing the Experience

Not all players are the same, so why should their ad experience be the same? A critical optimization layer is segmenting players based on their behavior.

Kelly Kang: “Think of it as a heavy ad watchers or passive ad watchers...every time they have ads available they continue to watch an ad. That means there’s less likely they’re going to actually click on that advertising. So we want to give them more of the impression-based advertising rather than action-based.”

This simple segmentation—between “aggressive” ad viewers who watch everything and “passive” viewers who watch occasionally—allows you to serve different campaign types to maximize yield without alienating users. We dive deeper into segmenting by player level and reward scaling in the video.

4. Operational Efficiency: Stop Wasting Time

One of the biggest hidden costs is wasted time. Kelly often sees multiple people—a PM, a GM, and an ad monetization manager—all spending an hour a day manually pulling the same data. Creating a single, automated template report can save dozens of hours a month.

The other key is leveraging your partners correctly. Don’t spend five hours digging for an answer; ask your network partner for their data and insights first.

Building a Team and a Strategy from Scratch

For a new game, Kelly advocates a surprisingly lean approach.

Kelly Kang: “I do believe in too many cooks in the kitchen causes problem...You don’t need a big team right away for a new game. One dedicated person focusing on setup, mediation, just a basic optimization day-to-day is usually enough.”

For early-stage studios, she recommends starting with a fractional headcount (half a person) or an external consultant to establish the right foundation without over-committing resources.

In our discussion, Kelly provides a detailed breakdown of how to choose your first mediation platform (LevelPlay vs. Max) and your first 4-6 ad network partners, and how to scale the team based on the revenue each new headcount can generate, not just the workload.

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What do you think? Is treating ad monetization as a core product feature from day one the biggest unlock, or are there other challenges we’re missing? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to watch the full video for even more deep-dive insights from Kelly.

TRANSCRIPT

The full discussion transcript with Kelly follows: