Situation
Soundhound came to Adapex looking to modernize their header bidding set-up for their music app. Though they had a solid demand stack of bidders, Soundhound felt they could be driving more revenue. The Soundhound music app allows users to find and play music with lyrics. Their advanced tech identifies music that is playing and offers 300M+ downloads and billions of songs discovered.
Solution
Soundhound’s demand stack of bidders was organized in a traditional format with all bidders employed by independent SDKs and waterfalls. After an audit of the current setup, Adapex implemented Merlin™, our in-app header bidding solution which enabled us to consolidate most of Soundhound’s previous partners in GAM SDK with Open Bidding and increase demand sources. Moving Soundhound to an updated header bidding solution built specifically for in-app monetization not only led to immediate revenue uplifts but also decreased troubleshooting issues and improved efficiencies.
The Adapex team performed ongoing optimizations, adding 4 bidders in GAM. We then set up a Prebid SDK so we could add even more partners, bringing in an additional 12 partners. Soundhound is currently using 16 demand sources through two easy-to-implement, and easy-to-maintain SDKs. We continue to optimize with the Soundhound team as more SSPs move to the header bidding side. Additionally, as Prebid continues to upgrade the open-source offer, features continue to be added and optimized.
Results
Soundhound has two apps, one on iOS and one on Android. Performance varied by platform, as iOS traffic has significantly more personalization restrictions. Soundhound’s Android app saw uplifts in CPM which led to increased revenue overall. And while Soundhound’s iOS app didn’t see the same uplift, they did find that their revenue was protected by the implementation of header bidding which commands higher CPMs.
