"Raise your eCPM" is easy to say and vague to act on. Below are seven concrete, realistic levers for indie and small-studio apps — ordered roughly from highest leverage to lowest. None require a bigger user base; they all work on the traffic you already have.
1. Turn on bidding for every network that supports it
Real-time bidding makes networks compete per impression instead of sitting in a fixed waterfall slot. It is the single biggest eCPM lever for most apps, and it removes a pile of manual tuning. Move every eligible network from waterfall to bidding and let the auction set the price.
2. Add rewarded video if you don't have it
Rewarded is consistently the highest-eCPM format. If your app only runs banners and interstitials, a single well-placed rewarded opportunity (extra life, double coins, unlock) often lifts blended eCPM more than any pricing tweak — because you're adding high-value inventory, not re-pricing cheap inventory.
3. Fix your floors per segment
Floors that are too low sell cheap; floors that are too high kill fill. Set them per country and format, anchored to your realized eCPM distribution, and revisit them as the market drifts. A floor that hasn't been touched in six months is almost certainly wrong now.
4. Add a few more demand sources (and prune dead ones)
More bidders competing usually means higher clearing prices — to a point. Add 2–3 reputable networks that bid in your geos, and in the same pass remove sources contributing near-zero fill, which only add latency. Density of active demand is what matters, not the raw count.
5. Improve your geo and format mix where you can
eCPM is heavily geo-dependent. You can't change who installs, but if you run UA, even a small shift toward tier-1 traffic raises blended eCPM. And within the app, surfacing more of your high-value format (rewarded) and less of the low-value one (low-floor banners) moves the blend without touching prices at all.
6. Reduce latency and timeouts
If your ad request times out before slow-but-high bidders respond, you systematically lose your best demand. Check your mediation timeout settings and SDK init timing — giving the auction enough time to hear premium bids is a quiet but real eCPM gain.
7. Respect frequency and UX
Counter-intuitively, showing fewer, better-placed ads can raise eCPM and revenue. Overloaded placements train users to ignore ads (lower engagement, lower value) and can trigger policy issues that cut fill. Sensible frequency caps protect both your retention and your per-impression value.
The meta-point
Notice that most of these aren't "get more users" — they're "stop leaking value on the users you have." The biggest eCPM wins for small apps are usually bidding, rewarded, and fresh floors, in that order. Start there.
Knowing which of these seven is your actual bottleneck — without guessing — is the hard part. Mediation One reads your CSV and tells you where the value is leaking: a network not on bidding, a stale floor, an underused format. The free audit is one CSV upload — no SDK, no signup, nothing stored.