Challenge
Existing waterfall vs Programmatic unified auction
Melsoft has been successfully incorporating ads into their monetization strategy for quite some time, using a waterfallbased setup. Despite this success, the Melsoft team felt that ads monetization did not reach its full potential, mainly due to the limitations of having to use historical, aggregated data to optimize the waterfall. Eager to test the impact of in-app bidding, the Melsoft team was looking to create a clean A/B test to evaluate the performance of a programmatic unified auction vs the performance delivered by its existing waterfall.
Solution
Create a clean A/B test
Using the Google Play Staged Rollout feature, Melsoft transitioned 40% of the Toy Defense 2 user-base to a version of the game that is powered by Fyber FairBid, keeping 60% of users on its existing waterfall setup.
Maximizing competition via Fyber FairBid
The same ad networks were used on both platforms, with AdColony and Facebook Audience Network switching from a waterfallbased integration to a real-time bidding integration on Fyber FairBid.
In addition, Fyber FairBid enabled Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to compete for every ad request alongside the traditional and bidding ad networks, maximizing competition over ad inventory without requiring any additional demand management resources from Melsoft’s team.
Clean A/B test
The geographical distribution of users was kept consistent across both platforms, and no other changes were made to the monetization setup, which was based on rewarded video placements.

Results
30%
increase in ARPDAU
50%
of revenue from bidding demand partners (ad networks + DSPs)
Efficiency.
Receiving real-time, committed prices from bidding demand partners helped the Melsoft team cut back on the work of managing a complex waterfall while providing confidence that the impression was monetized based on the highest bid.
We were very curious to test Fyber FairBid and the potential of programmatic monetization. We found that the effort and resources that went into the integration and setup were very similar to integrations we experienced in the past. The Fyber team provided us with the support and service we needed in order to feel comfortable with the process and we were very happy with the results.