MAX User Journey: Innovation in Stopping Bad Ads | AppLovin

While all successful apps sprout from the seed of an incredible idea, user experience is what keeps them healthy and thriving. One of the most impactful user experiences lives outside of your core app: The ads you’re serving. One bad apple can spoil the bunch, so when a problematic ad is served through your network and reported by users, it is imperative that you find and eliminate the problem as fast as possible. But we already know that it can take days—and a pile of negative reviews in the meantime—to find the network that served the ad, determine which ad it was, and report it. By the end of it all, you’ve used a ton of time and your app store rating may have dropped.

MAX’s Ad Review was created to help mobile developers monitor and manage the overall ad experience in their apps, from flagging and mitigating risky creatives; to understanding competition; to ensuring relevancy of future third-party and self-promotional ads. Ad Review is now taking this a step farther with its new User Journey feature, allowing developers to drill down into an individual user’s specific ad experience and address problems much more quickly and directly.

Here’s how MAX User Journey—available to publishers by invite only—is introducing a unique way of addressing bad ads that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the industry, and how it benefits both developers and users.

UX protection through ad user journey visibility

It’s all in the name, right? By programmatically adding a user’s unique ID (their gamer ID, for instance) to MAX, your customer service or support teams can see a timeline of that user’s ad impressions right in the MAX UI, including all relevant ad creative details, to quickly isolate and report inappropriate ad content. This means a much more streamlined support workflow, as well as a more enjoyable app experience for users and, in turn, sustained and higher retention rates.

Save time hunting for bad ads

In order to find problematic ads that have been reported by users, a developer often only has access to either incomplete or inaccurate information. This leads to manually digging through device or Charles logs to find the offending ad creative served on their app, to then report to the network to be blocked, all while app ratings start to diminish. However, networks won’t always acknowledge these ad reports if there isn’t a “smoking gun” of information that ties the ad back to them, such as a creative ID. 

As we learned above, User Journey allows you to find bad ads—with all relevant information to block them—on specific, much smaller ad timelines based on user-reported complaints you receive. This saves a substantial amount of time in the identification process.

Here’s what Beatriz Dias, Monetization Analyst for Brazilian game studio Fanatee, recently had to say about this:

“Discovering unfavorable ads used to place a considerable burden on our Customer Support team. MAX User Journey has helped our team track down ad-related issues within minutes, saving countless hours of investigative work and a pile up of negative reviews. We’re optimistic that User Journeys will translate to an even higher App Store rating with time.”

Defend resources and revenue

Without accurate ad creative info, publishers may try to address bad ads through the process of elimination by blocking specific ads, advertisers, or even entire networks, in the name of doing all they can to stop these issues in their tracks. This scattershot approach can cause a considerable slowdown in ad serving, which means major disruptions to revenue flow.

With User Journey, you get to crucial information about bad ads faster and with accuracy, ensuring that blindly blocking is no longer necessary. With this approach, network partner relationships are maintained and revenue is preserved.

Learn more about MAX Ad Review here, and ensure better app experiences with these tools and more by joining MAX today.