How does a new project live up to its playtesting potential? When MY.GAMES began testing Rush Royale, senior user acquisition manager Ekaterina Zueva knew they had an opportunity to harness the user acquisition team’s collective experience and new solutions from Unity to make the game a success.
After launching Rush Royale, the MY.GAMES team found themselves spending hours per week optimizing various user acquisition campaigns. Resourcing and time constraints kept the team from unlocking the game’s true potential, so they turned to Unity’s API feed to automate campaigns for increased performance and exceeded predicted ROI.
Rush Royale invites players to a realm of tower defense, clans, magic, and mayhem. Players collect card units, assemble a deck for base defense, and battle in a game full of action, adventure, and fun.
With over 70 games and 150 titles in its portfolio, MY.GAMES is no stranger to developing games. This scale allows them to playtest in-development projects extensively, which helped the user acquisition team key in on Rush Royale as one with potential.
“Our goal is to create great games that can secure top spots in their respective categories, so we often do a lot of playtests,” says Zueva. “But Rush Royale was super successful in testing, so we decided to skip soft launching.”
This playtesting, combined with a new set of campaign automation tools, made it a candidate for long-term success.
MY.GAMES benefits from a wealth of campaign experience gained across all the titles their studio produces. This helps growth teams when they’re launching new titles, since they share best practices to advance campaigns using different kinds of optimization.
“Unity is always one of the first ad platforms we use when launching a new game. We start with tracking CPI goals. Then gradually we’ll open campaigns with other optimization types for ROAS and retention goals,” says Zueva. “Plus we try to understand in the first weeks or months which ad creatives are suitable for using in Unity.”
A year after launching Rush Royale, this strategy was in place and performing well, but time management challenges started to arise.
“It was becoming very time consuming to manually manage all our campaigns,” says Zueva. “I was spending hours per week on optimization efforts.”
Determined to find a better solution, she started to explore the Unity API feed for Rush Royale. With an API feed, they could automate campaign decisions, avoid human errors from manual input, and better align with Unity recommendations for campaign optimization.
One of the biggest benefits Zueva saw with using an API feed was that campaign logic could be shared among team members. “It would also allow us to quickly transfer expertise from one UA manager to another because the schemes and logic would be standardized for all campaigns,” she explains.
To start, Zueva and a member of the MY.GAMES analytics team gathered information from Unity’s documentation and account managers.
They wanted to optimize for all Unity campaign types, as well as both iOS and Android. The result was a few schemes that were different but had similar controls for things like bids, ROAS targets, sources, creatives, and budgets.
“For example, with CPI campaigns we wanted to be able to change bids and sources every week, while for ROAS campaigns, it was every month,” explains Zueva. “So the logic is a little different for every campaign type.”
After a few months of testing with Unity, Zueva and her team felt confident in being able to put the API feed into action on Rush Royale via their new analytics tools.
As with any investment of time and resources, ensuring its value was top of mind. “One of the most important metrics for us was predicted ROI,” she says, “and we managed to keep it higher than 100% when implementing the API feed.”
Beyond exceeding forecasts, the API feed also gave them back time to focus on other optimization needs such as growing campaigns with ad ROAS goals.
Most importantly the main goal around efficiency was realized almost immediately. She continues, “The process of optimization is eight times shorter for me. I can now dedicate that time to other important tasks and it is easier to keep us on target for our goals.”
