20-50% fill rates

I have been using unityads for 2 months in one of my games and i have been having really inconsistent results with it and i have been wondering why.

When i test it on my devices it always works flawlessly and shows the ads whenever it should....but the live game has always had 20-50% fill rates in these 2 months.
I already asked why to the support team and they told me it probably had to do with countries of my playerbase not having ads to show....that could be true some weeks ago when most of my players were from eastern asia....but in the last pair of weeks my, small, userbase is mostly made up of european/american countries and, yet, the fill rate remained the same....well....actually it went down.

I compared two days of the last week, in which i had 50% and 24% fill rate respectively; the top played countries were mostly the same (france,brasil,greece,us,argentina,italy...) and, yet, my fill rate not only remain really low, but it also widely changes from 25 to 50% for no apparent reason.

Finally, in the last 10 days, the income has been really ridiculous too....in the past months i had the occasional day with no revenue....but in the last 10 days i had 8 days with 0 income at all and 1.7$ in the remaining 2 days....

Ok, my numbers are pretty small (50-100 daily completed ads)....but 1.7$ out of nearly 600 video is pretty crap....

Summing that with the fact that i could have shown 2-4x the number of ads if i didn't have the fill rate problem, the experience with unityads has been really bad lately.

Am i the only one having these problems (especially the crappy fill rates?).

Here are 2 ss showing the fill rates and the most played countries:

 

This is understandable, but not what you'd expect.

The reason fill rates are typically either 33% or 50% is due the additional ad requests being made for zones that implement picture ads. Video ad request have a high fill rate for most countries. However, fill for picture ads have been extremely limited for English speaking counties, and in most cases not available to non-English speaking countries.

A fill rate of 33% is common for new game profiles that still have picture zones enabled. The 50% fill rate typically indicates that the pictureZone is disabled, but that the option to show picture ads when no videos are available is still enabled for the defaultVideoAndPictureZone. Each of these zones will increment the adrequest figure by 1. Video ads on the other hand only make a single adrequest, regardless of the number of zones that use them.

With priorities focused making our video ads service the best it can be, we are in the process of temporarily removing support for picture ads from Unity Ads, which is why new game IDs no longer include the "pictureZone" ID. Picture ads have been in beta for some time now. We felt that it would be best to shelve the picture ads feature for the time being, until a later time when we can return to it and finalize the feature.

As for revenue, if you can provide me with a game ID in a private conversation, I can look into the specifics further.

Thanks for asking and for posting such a detailed report.

 

First of all, thank you for your answer. I sent you a private message with my game ID so as you asked.

I am not sure,though, if i correctly understood what you said about the picture ads zone.
I used the default placement for my only call to unityads in my code by passing "null" as a parameter in Advertisment.Show() metod, as explained here:
https://github.com/Applifier/unity-ads/wiki/Introduction-to-Ad-Placements

According to that page it should only show video ads with the possibility to skip the video (which is exactly what i was seeing in my personal testing on my devices), there is nothing about picture ads being shown using the default placement.
If i understood correctly your answer, instead, the default placement also have picture ads enabled?
Does this mean that I had to specify some other kind of placement or did i make it correctly?

But, even if that was the case, the game is still the same, so why there is so much difference in fill rates in the various days when the user base is basically more or less coming from the same countries?

 

It's important to understand that adrequests are not made when you attempt to show an ad. They are made well before hand when Unity Ads is initialized. The response is a list of available ads, if there are ads available.

It's also important to know that only enabled zones will trigger adrequests. Only a single adrequest is made for video ads, regardless of the number of zones that use them. However, each zone that allows for the use of picture ads will fire an additional adrequest, which has been factor offsetting the fill rate.

I saw you sent me a private conversation with your game ID. I'll look into this further and respond to you there.

 

Ahhh ok, so since i am using a single zone with default placement, which asks for both video and pictures (if i got it correctly), i am getting 2 request ads per time i ask for an ads.

Thank you, i am looking forward for your answer then

 

still waiting your answer about my problem....which is even getting worst now....in the last 30 days i had 24 days where i made 0$, and in the other 6 days, i made 6$ summing up.....

To clarify the difference with before.....
I started using unityads at the end of november 2014....in the first 3 months i made 80$, in the last one (since i started having this unacceptable eCPM) i made 6$.....can you see why i am worried about it??