Jam City is an award-winning mobile entertainment company based out of California. Founded in 2010, Jam City boasts many top hits, including Cookie Jam which has generated more than half a billion dollars, and Panda Pop which has more than 120 million downloads to date.
Hear from Tony Yin, Ad Business Operations Analyst at Jam City, about how Ad Quality by ironSource helped them decide which games they can safely unblock from competitors without sacrificing revenue.
A new era of privacy
Following the industry’s new privacy regulations, our team at Jam City was concerned that as advertisers became more cautious with their bids and budgets, our revenue would decline. To get ahead of the problem as much as possible, we considered unblocking competing advertisers from advertising in our games to compensate for potential revenue loss.
Naturally, we were cautious that unblocking competitor content could cause users to leave our app for our competitors’ apps, which would impact our retention. Ultimately, we needed a platform that would allow us to test whether the increases in CPM and revenue generated from the newly unblocked games would compensate for the number of users leaving our app.
Compare revenue and CPM against churn
First, we tested unblocking all match-3 competitor content on three of our games - Genies & Gems, Vineyard Valley, and Panda Pop. We started working with ironSource’s Ad Quality product to measure churn data in conjunction with revenue, and a few other metrics. With the tool’s advanced data filtering, we were able to match Ad Quality’s key metrics to our internal data, making it possible for us to track changes in revenue, churn, and CPM on a granular level. Ad Quality’s advanced data capabilities also allowed us to look at which advertisers and creatives drove the highest growth.
Keeping some games unblocked
Integrating Ad Quality into our games provided full transparency into our data and made it possible for us to monitor performance on a granular level. The team at ironSource also offered valuable insights and analysis about whether our unblocked content was generating enough money. Ultimately, we found that with Ad Quality, unblocking content is no longer a risk as long as we have the ability to track and analyze performance.
"With the help from the team at ironSource, we were able to decide which games we could keep unblocked to sustain higher CPMs while staying within a reasonable churn rate threshold - leading to higher overall revenue."
- Tony Yin, Ad Business Operations Analyst at Jam City
For Genies & Gems, we initially saw about 2x the usual churn count for unblocked advertisers. Eventually, the churn rate stabilized and the CPM increased by 20%. Since we did not see an impact on retention, we decided to keep our competitors unblocked.
Nevertheless, we saw the opposite effect on Panda Pop and Vineyard Valley. We reverted Panda Pop and Vineyard Valley to blocking competitor content because the CPMs didn’t remain high enough to account for the churn. That said, we intend to test these titles and the rest of our games again soon.
At the end of the day, the platform and the team at ironSource are easy to work with and made it possible to test unblocked competitors efficiently and with confidence, opening a whole new revenue stream for Jam City.
