Founded in 2011, Fugo Games develops and releases games in 35+ languages, allowing them to communicate with 250M people worldwide. Their iconic word game, Words of Wonders: Crossword, is currently being played in 150+ countries.
Read to learn how Egemen Güven, Marketing Manager at Fugo, and his team increased installs 20x running on all of Aura’s available placements across 12 geos for their game Words of Wonders: Crossword.
Expanding our ironSource partnership to scale our UA
Looking to penetrate new markets, we began looking into new UA channels. Considering we were already using ironSource for UA, the team told us about its on-device advertising solution, Aura, and explained how its touchpoints would allow us to reach users first and directly on the device, improving the stickiness of our app in the long-term. Intrigued by the channel's unique offering and having seen success with ironSource already, we were introduced to the Aura team.
Running on all of Aura’s placements
We tested Aura in 4 different geos for our game, Words of Wonders: Crosswords. Initially, we aimed to optimize retention, but moved to Cost Per Retained User (CPRU) based on the ironSource team’s suggestions. The team explained that Aura reaches users at moments they’re looking to download their long-term apps, not necessarily at moments they’re ready to start using them. This means that while initial retention rates may drop initially, the retention curve is stable for an incredibly long time, improving the stickiness of our app overall.
Trusting the ironSource team and willing to test new things, we took their recommendation to measure performance differently than we originally intended. Optimizing for CPRU, our Aura campaigns scaled tremendously - that’s because we ran campaigns on all segments, without exclusions, and gave ironSource free range to develop a multi-bid strategy based on segment performance.
As our profit improved, we gradually increased our CPRU KPI, allowing us to scale our campaigns even further. Eventually, we had campaigns live in 12 geos and on all available placements - smart preloads (intelligently places our app directly on users’ phones during setup), setup manager (offers our app to users when they’re setting up their new device), discovery manager (offers our app to users based on contextual triggers), and notifications (encourages users to open our app for the first time or install it when they’re engaged).
Increasing on-device installs 20X with Aura
Running with Aura, we cracked new markets, something we were hoping to accomplish. We also improved our profit and scaled our campaigns with long-term, quality users. In fact, from Q4 2020 to Q4 2021, our on-device installs increased 20x.
Switching to dynamic bidding in October 2020 and looking at Aura performance by CPRU, we were able to open more segments in lower CPIs. This allowed us to improve scale with Aura, while decreasing eCPI.
We had meetings with the Aura team bi-weekly to sync on our performance and profit. Along with having open discussions about which campaigns we should be pushing and how, the team was proactive about updating us on new opportunities within ironSource.
"If you're looking to crack new placements for your UA, then Aura should be an essential part of your growth strategy. They delivered reach and quality across all of our markets."
ironSource now optimizes the performance of our business from monetization to UA, and we look forward to working with the platform in even more ways in the future.
