PONOS is a major game publisher headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. They are best known for publishing the hit tower defense game, The Battle Cats. The PONOS team was spending too much time optimizing their ad monetization and needed a solution to focus on the more urgent work at hand. The ironSource team recommended an optimal waterfall setup on LevelPlay, including the Tapjoy bidding network, and the rest was history.
Yuta Nozawa, Chief Promoter at PONOS, details how moving to in-app bidding, particularly adding Tapjoy in-app bidding, allowed them to monetize more easily and see a 15% ARPDAU increase and 100% revenue increase.
Optimizing the waterfall
The process of optimizing each instance per network, operating system, and geo was taking too much of our team’s valuable time. We needed a solution to reduce our workload so that we could focus on more pressing work. The ironSource team suggested that we use in-app bidding to optimize our monetization, and we were very open to the idea.
To reduce our workload, the ironSource team set up bidding networks directly in LevelPlay and provided quality assurance to ensure that all of the bidding networks work properly. From there, the improvements came quickly: ARPDAU increased by 15% and revenue by 2x.
Finding success with Tapjoy
Our most significant increase came from the Tapjoy bidder - our eCPM tripled, and ARPDAU grew by 7x. We have also been using the Tapjoy Offerwall and look forward to strengthening our ad monetization strategy further. Now we depend on both Tapjoy and ironSource for our ad monetization, and we’re very interested in utilizing other features from the ironSource mediation platform.
"Now we depend on both Tapjoy and ironSource for our ad monetization, and we’re very interested in utilizing other features from the ironSource mediation platform."
- Yuta Nozawa, Chief Promoter at PONOS
Working with the ironSource team has been a major success for our team - we managed to increase ad revenue while getting rid of the day-to-day optimization workload. In fact, we haven’t had to handle our instances since. We have found so much success using the LevelPlay platform that we hope to try its other features, like Ad Quality. Putting our trust in the ironSource team allowed us to re-allocate our time and resources in the best way - we look forward to continuing the fruitful partnership.
"Working with the ironSource team has been a major success for our team. We look forward to continuing the fruitful partnership."
- Yuta Nozawa, Chief Promoter at PONOS
