Unico Studio is a mobile games company based in Palo Alto, California. Unico’s latest hyper-casual game Brain Test reached #1 in the US and remained at the top of the charts for months.
Erkay Uzun is the co-founder of Unico Studio. Read on to hear how his team uses LevelPlay, ironSource’s in-app bidding solution, to increase ad revenue.
Faster than we could handle
Our game Brain Test was highly marketable from the start - our UA bids were extremely low just because of how well our creatives were performing, which is why the game was moving up the charts with minimum spend. Recognizing its potential, ironSource suggested we scale our user acquisition and increase our budgets.
The problem was, however, that Brain Test was growing faster than we could handle - it was just three of us managing day-to-day monetization and user acquisition operations across 20+ geos. At the time, we were managing complex waterfalls with upwards of 40-50 instances each.
Turning to LevelPlay
The team at ironSource was a huge help in reducing our manual operations while increasing our output and scale. They held multiple training sessions with us, providing us best practices for growth, including how to restructure our waterfall.
Following ironSource’s recommendation, we utilized the platform’s ad monetization A/B testing tool to learn how a traditional waterfall would perform against a waterfall with LevelPlay in-app bidding.
"ironSource was a huge help in reducing our manual operations while increasing our output and scale"
- Erkay Uzun, co-founder at Unico Studio
Boosting performance and increasing ARPDAU
After 3 weeks of testing, we saw that LevelPlay ultimately outperformed the traditional waterfall, both in terms of increasing revenue and reducing our manual operations. Specifically, Brain Test’s ARPDAU and eCPM went up after turning on LevelPlay, which was significant considering how well-optimized our waterfall was previously.
Getting our time back
Since running with LevelPlay, waterfall management has become infinitely easier - we no longer need to manually optimize and organize instances from our top-performing networks, and instead trust LevelPlay to get the highest price for each impression. Now we can focus our time elsewhere, like finding our next new hit and improving the gameplay within Brain Test.
"We trust LevelPlay to get the highest price for each impression"
- Erkay Uzun, co-founder at Unico Studio
Working with ironSource
We’ve found that ironSource's team is highly experienced - both in monetization and user acquisition, and they also know the mobile game ecosystem very well. Most importantly, ironSource understands our needs, and they work hard to provide the best solutions to our problems. We’re a small team, so it’s great to feel the close support of their 24/7 availability.
