What a Good Monetization Audit Should Actually Uncover
Most monetization audits stop at the dashboard: eCPMs, placements, price points. The useful findings are usually upstream — in timing, player state, measurement and the trade-offs nobody decided.
What is a monetization audit for?
To find where revenue is being left behind or borrowed from the future — and to rank what to change first. A useful audit explains why revenue behaves the way it does. A weak one lists eCPMs and suggests adding a network.
What should it cover?
1. Player moments and timing
- Where does each ad and offer appear relative to what the player is trying to do?
- Are offers arriving before the player cares about what they protect? See Most Monetization Problems Are Timing Problems.
- Is a rewarded placement a continuation mechanic, or an escape from friction the game created?
2. Ad delivery and mediation
- Revenue per eligible opportunity by placement, geo and platform — not just eCPM.
- Bid rate, win rate and show rate per network; latency, load failures and SDK weight.
- Floors, dead waterfall instances, and networks that add little but cost stability.
3. IAP, pricing and offers
- Payer conversion, first-purchase design, price architecture and offer cadence.
- Whether pricing changes are read on behaviour as well as revenue — see Pricing Architecture Is Product Architecture.
- Ad–IAP interaction: are ads eroding the value of what payers bought?
4. Measurement integrity
- Are metric definitions consistent across dashboards?
- Is ad revenue joined to acquisition source so UA can value users correctly?
- Are decisions being made on mature data?
5. The decision system
- Do tests have protected metrics and rollback points?
- Who owns each lever, and what triggers a decision to be revisited?
- Which past changes were never read for their cost?
What should the output look like?
A short, prioritised list — usually five to ten interventions — each with the expected impact, the risk, what to measure, and who owns it. Plus the few structural fixes (definitions, guardrails, ownership) that make the next changes easier to read. If the audit produces a 60-page report and no owner for anything, it has not done its job.
What does it usually find?
In my experience across a large, ad-led portfolio (at peak around 85% ads and 15% IAP), the biggest findings rarely sit where the team is looking. They are usually in timing and player state, in delivery rather than price, and in changes that shipped without anyone reading what they cost.
The Monetization Audit engagement is built on this structure and scoped on the first call.