Founded in 2012, mobile game publisher Gram Games has offices in London and Istanbul and employs over 90 people. Since its inception, Gram Games has gone on to publish ten games spanning the hyper-casual, puzzle, and merging game genres, and among its biggest hits are Merge! Dragons and Merge Magic!. In 2018, Gram Games found itself right at home when it became part of Zynga, the publisher behind casual hits like FarmVille and Words With Friends.
Gram Games first started working with Tapjoy in 2015, implementing a range of campaigns using both Video to Install and Cost Per Engagement offer types. In 2019, the publisher became one of Tapjoy’s first partners to use the Per-App Bidding (PAB) feature as a beta partner which allows advertisers to bid a different amount per publisher app.
In early 2020, Gram Games decided to focus solely on CPE ad campaigns with Tapjoy to drive user acquisition for Merge Dragons! and Merge Magic!. The team hoped that using Per-App-Bidding would allow them to optimize even further, scaling their efforts in the US and beyond.
Strategy
Gram Games kicked off 2020 by testing a new CPE event across both Merge Magic! and Merge Dragons! in the US utilizing the Per-App Bidding feature. After years of running the same CPE events, Tapjoy’s mobile strategists advised that Gram Games move away from linear level completion rewards to events that took longer to complete.
After seeing positive results in the United States, Gram Games then used this same strategy in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, and France. The team continued to optimize on the publisher level, using Per-App Bidding to maintain offerwall rank position and help Gram Games reach its ROAS goals.
Results
Leveraging Per-App Bidding in the Merge Magic! and Merge Dragons! campaigns resulted in a significant increase in scale while consistently hitting ROAS targets. This increase in conversions and installs proved that publisher-level optimization is helpful for targeting higher-quality users and weeding out poor-quality traffic sources.
"With CPE and Per-App Bidding, we’ve been able to push high-performing sources and reduce spend on lower-performing sources. This has saved us both time and effort and would recommend that other advertisers leverage this feature."
- Anushka Mukherjee, UA Associate, Gram Games
