Amanotes is a popular app publisher based in Vietnam with a portfolio of hit musical games including Magic Tiles 3, Tiles Hop: EDM Rush, and Dunk n Beat.
To maintain a high-performing UA strategy across their different games, Amanotes uses the ironSource bidding cross promotion solution. Rahul Ravindranath, Monetization Specialist at Amanotes, discusses his experience with the solution for their newest game.
Looking for a transparent, scalable solution
At Amanotes, we operate a portfolio of several successful games, and so maintaining players within our ecosystem is crucial. Our team used to do cross promotion using different networks, including ironSource - essentially buying our own supply, as part of any other user acquisition campaign.
Doing so provided us with access to network optimization and therefore to higher quality users, but also brought a few issues:
First, we had no transparency on cross promotion’s impact on monetization performance, since cross promotion and other network campaigns were blended together within each waterfall instance.
Additionally, managing cross promotion instances inside our waterfalls and constantly optimizing them required us to devote a lot of our operational resources and time. This level of manual effort took us away from other parts of the business that we could focus on, like enhancing game design or optimizing our creatives.
Finally, we were driving up the price of our own inventory since we were essentially competing with other advertisers over the same instance across different networks. This ultimately affected our user acquisition performance, including ROI and scale.
Transparency, control, and performance reporting for monetization
ironSource created a solution for cross promotion campaigns that eliminates competition among advertisers within the same line item and provides us with performance transparency that networks running traditional cross promotion campaigns don’t. This solution effectively functions as a dedicated bidder within ironSource’s in-app bidding platform, LevelPlay.
We needed very little manual setup or work to start using the cross promotion bidder - it was just like setting up any other bidding network. Once it was up and running, it gave a big boost to our monetization strategy. Because it functioned as a bidder within LevelPlay, it was automatically optimizing our monetization stack without the need for much manual work, all while giving us the transparency and detailed reporting we get with any other bidder.
"It was automatically optimizing our monetization stack without the need for much manual work, all while giving us the transparency and detailed reporting we get with any other bidder."
- Rahul Ravindranath, Monetization Specialist at Amanotes
Because LevelPlay was making sure our cross promotion campaigns were always optimized, we knew we were always getting the most revenue possible. In fact, we achieved the following results:
22% increase in ARPDAU
24% increase in eCPM
25% increase in revenue
Boosting user acquisition KPIs
As we mentioned, our waterfall wasn’t fully optimized for cross promotion at first (we had only a few cross promotion manual instances), so scale was limited - our cross promotion campaigns didn’t have many price points to fight for.
But once we switched to the cross promotion bidder, we were able to position ourselves on the UA side in the right place in the waterfall - sometimes higher, sometimes lower - and in geos where we weren’t even running before. Running in higher places in the waterfall and receiving earlier impressions increased our IPM, and once the IPM increased, we were able to decrease while still keeping performance and delivery stable. This created a wider dispersion of bids, optimized spend, and saved us the time and effort that we used to spend trying to pinpoint the perfect CPI.
Ultimately, the cross promotion solution helped us increase scale, engagement, and profit. These benefits worked with the cross promotion solution’s dynamic suppression and machine learning targeting, which meant we were getting significantly more scale for lower CPI and higher ROAS. We were able to achieve results like on ironSource:
50% decrease in CPI
12x increase in installs
2x higher IPM
Another great experience working with ironSource
Now we use ironSource’s cross promotion solution across our entire app portfolio because the boost it’s given both our monetization and UA sides.
The support and transparency from the team is another way that ironSource stands out for us. We’ve truly enjoyed working with ironSource and look forward to building upon the success of the cross promotion bidder for more of our games into the future.
