Rewarded play. Play-to-earn. Incent. Whatever you call it, mobile gamers love it. Ads that reward players for their engagement are a win-win for everyone involved, including the advertisers. Increasingly, smart app owners and mobile advertisers are finding new ways to use the dynamic that rewarded ads set up to encourage user acquisition (UA) and drive long-term engagement. That often comes in the form of Rewarded Play, which keeps users coming back for more to earn valuable in-game assets.

Like most supply types outside of search and social, using Rewarded Play effectively requires a skill set often beyond the scope of small, overworked UA teams. In this article, we explore the ins and outs of rewarded play.

What is Rewarded Play?

Rewarded Play is exactly what it sounds like; app users are rewarded for playing or engaging with an app. Essentially, players are rewarded for their time playing a game, usually with in-app currency, special items, or other meaningful rewards. This dynamic encourages users to return frequently, and often, the more time a player spends in a game, the more rewards they collect. Increasingly, other types of apps are finding ways to apply the idea behind rewarded play to non-gaming apps.

Pros and cons of Rewarded Play

While Incent Traffic and Rewarded Play are intrinsically linked, they are different. Incent Traffic encourages user acquisition but can have lower retention rates. Rewarded play is all about driving engagement and retention in the long run.

Tips for being successful with Rewarded Play

Here at FeedMob, we fundamentally focused on user acquisition. Still, mobile marketers increasingly know they must back up their UA efforts with a retention plan to ensure their UA dollars go further. For many apps, rewarding users for their engagement is the answer.

Rewarded Play in games is now commonplace — mobile gaming apps that don’t use this tactic do so at their peril. However, other types of apps can use this same tactic creatively. Imagine you operate a food delivery app, and are seeing that your retention rates are low. Users download the app in a time of need and then forget about it for weeks or months until they need take-out delivered again. You could use the digital equivalent of a loyalty card, giving users a free order — or even just a discount — for making five orders within a given time.

Success with this tactic is all about the rewards. What will you offer your users to keep them coming back? How often will you offer specific rewards to find the balance between driving engagement and giving away the store? Experimentation will give you the answers to these questions — or you can seek help from the pros to find out what’s working for other app developers. If you want to learn more about Rewarded Play give us a shout.