Our client is a hyper-fast mobile game publisher, which also helps game developers to create new mobile games and climb the ranks in the app store. With almost 20 years of game development expertise, they have created popular mobile games in the hyper-casual realm, ranging from racing games to puzzle and merge games.
Challenge:
We have been working with this advertiser on user acquisition for months, running app install campaigns for three of their most popular apps. In Q4 2022, they focused their user acquisition efforts in Brazil, one of the fastest growing countries for consumer spend in-app. Mapendo could help running app install campaigns in such a country, where CPI payouts are usually low compared to tier-1 and tier-2 countries. As a result, downward competition and razor-thin margins make it difficult to run ROI-positive app campaigns.
Thus, we agreed on running app install campaigns for a racing mobile game, which ranks among the top 100 apps in the category. Such hyper-casual games monetize through ad revenues and usually have high churn rates, which make the generation of high-LTV users challenging.
Our goal was to grow their user base by targeting Android users specifically, given the platform’s local market share. On top of that, the campaign’s KPI target was a Day-30 ROI of 110%.
Our Solution:
Based on our previous experience with racing mobile games, we set up a CPI app campaign, buying programmatic ad placements from several RTB exchanges. In the process, our team followed a well-thought strategy to meet the advertiser’s demands.
- First of all, we let our machine learning algorithms optimize the traffic acquisition towards exchanges and publishers with higher install rates. In addition, based on our learnings from past app campaigns for racing games, our A.I.-powered optimization was already able to drive the users with the highest ARPU.
- At the same time, we rotated and A/B tested multiple ad formats provided by the advertiser. We found out that short-form videos about gameplay, compared to more generic ones, were responsible for bringing in users who generated the largest amount of ad revenues for the app. By focusing on such 30 second videos, we increased ARPU by 25%.
- Finally, we leveraged Mapendo’s creative production tool to generate and A/B test native ads by dynamically combining assets from the app store page, such as logo, name, description, etc. Such ad concepts, produced exclusively by technology and without a design team, allowed us to improve the performance in terms of ROI and scale the volume of installs.
Results
The switch to video creatives drove a 25% increase in ARPU, while the ML-powered optimization resulted in scaling the installs by 34%. Dynamic ads generated by our internal creative production tool proved essential to achieve our target KPI, and Mapendo exceeded the client’s expectations by delivering a 138% Day-30 ROI for Android users in Brazil.
We look forward to strengthening our partnership with this game publisher and helping them grow their apps all over the world, delivering high-quality users and ROI positive app install campaigns.
