Lilith Games is the third largest game developer and publisher in China by revenue. Its portfolio includes chart-topping games like Rise of Kingdoms, Art of Conquest, AFK Arena, Soul Hunters, and more.
Yi Mengqiao is the Head of UA at Lilith Games. Read on to learn how she and her UA team tripled their install volume for their game Rise of Kingdoms running double credit promotion campaigns on the ironSource offerwall.
Trying to balance quality and scale
Our user acquisition strategy at Lilith Games has always prioritized ROI, focusing on long-term sustainability instead of aggressive scale. It’s been difficult for us to strike a perfect balance between the two sides and acquire a large number of quality users with promising ROI.
Learning the ins and outs of the offerwall
We’ve been running offerwall user acquisition campaigns for some time now. In the beginning, we started with shallow events, like first purchase - meaning users who engaged with an offerwall on, let’s say, Game A and saw an offer by Lilith Games, would have to install our game and make a purchase in order to receive their in-game reward in Game A.
But as we continued acquiring users through the offerwall, we began experimenting with deeper and deeper in-game events, such as complete level 2 troops. In fact, ironSource’s growth strategy team played a big part in helping us determine the in-game events that would maximize ROI according to our goals. Ultimately, we learned that shallow events performed well for driving short-term ROI, while deep events drove long-term ROI performance.
"ironSource’s growth strategy team played a big part in helping us determine the in-game events that would maximize ROI according to our goals."
- Yi Mengqiao, Head of UA at Lilith Games
Hitting it big Thanksgiving weekend
Last year, our UA team decided to try something new - we participated in ironSource’s double credit offerwall promotion campaign over Thanksgiving weekend.
During big holiday weekends, ironSource publishers run “double credit promotions” on their offerwall, so that for a limited time, their users receive twice the usual amount of in-game currency for completing a task on the offerwall. As advertisers, this is great for us - since it means more users will be engaging with our offers for Rise of Kingdoms, giving us increased visibility among our target audiences.
Ahead of the double credit promotion, we decided to raise our bids to ensure maximum scale, and that Lilith’s offers would be seen at the top of the offerwall.
Outperforming our KPIs
That Thanksgiving weekend, we increased our volume by 4x - largely because of our decision to increase our bids. Of course, scale was already higher than usual because of the double credit promotion campaign, but by increasing bids and guaranteeing that our offers would top the offerwalls for nearly every impression, we were able to capitalize on that increased scale and access even more users. In fact, eCPA increased by 20%, showing that the bid increase had a direct impact on the volume.
As a result, on the monetization side, we saw our ARPU increase by 3x, and our purchase rate by 20% - delivering a 2x increase in our D7 ROAS.
Normally our UA team doesn’t blindly chase volume, but by running with ironSource during their double credit offerwall promotions, we found out that there is in fact a way to acquire quality users with positive ROI at scale.
Partnering with ironSource
At Lilith Games, we care a lot about sustainability and strategic growth - and so we truly appreciate the professionalism and expertise of ironSource’s growth strategy team. They constantly provide us with real-time feedback regarding ROI as well as in-depth data analysis, which gives us the full picture of our overall performance.
"With ironSource, we found out that there is in fact a way to acquire quality users with positive ROI at scale."
- Yi Mengqiao, Head of UA at Lilith Games
ironSource’s user acquisition platform has also been a very valuable tool for our team as well - it’s simple to use and we get transparency into the app sources we’re running our campaigns on, ultimately strengthening our continued trust in ironSource.
