Founded in 2009, Game Hive is a pioneer in creating the best game experiences across multiple mobile platforms. With monster franchises, like Tap Titans and Beat the Boss, and hit games, like Battle Run and Tap Tycoon, Game Hive has achieved over 200+ million downloads.
Read on to learn how Hafsa Akhlaq, Growth Marketing Manager at Game Hive, improved user experience and their creative strategy with Ad Quality by ironSource.
Monitoring ads and creative trends across multiple ad networks
While the vast majority of ad networks allow us to view the creatives served in our apps, they are limited to the ads within that single network, which means we have to spend time working across multiple platforms checking ads one by one. Even more so, not all ad networks have the same criteria for flagging ads as inappropriate, bad UX, offensive, etc, making it difficult for our Ad Monetization team to make a like for like comparison among different creatives and ad networks.
This is where we saw huge value in working with Ad Quality by ironSource. The creative overview tab creates a unified approach to evaluating creatives across multiple platforms, standardizing how we address creatives. It also grants insight into bad UX, highly valuable information that isn’t flagged by most mediation providers.
With a gallery style view that allows us to see every ad shown, we now have control and transparency over what is happening inside our app, and can identify advertisers that may be running ads that harm the user journey. With the aid of the tool’s performance metrics, we have been able to detect auto-clicking, auto redirects, buggy, misleading or inappropriate ads which lead to poor user experience. This is valuable information we haven’t had access to previously.
Additionally, Ad Quality gives us insight into up-and-coming creative trends and some proven high-impact concepts. With valuable performance metrics, such as impressions, CPMs, and Ad Quality’s unique quality indicator for ads (QCTR), we can easily identify top performing creatives. If the top creatives served in our app are working well for our competitors, it’s a good indicator that these types of ads will also resonate well with our audience. We can then take this information to our UA teams to help aid in their creative strategy and designs. We are happy to say that our UA team has seen strong performance from these creative insights.
Improving the player experience and addressing complaints
With Ad Quality’s user journey feature, we have changed the way we approach addressing customer complaints.
Previously, when players complained about ad related technical issues, there wasn’t an easy way for us to identify the cause of the complaint or the ad network responsible. Our customer support team would need to ask for screenshots or further details about the network or advertiser, which is not easily reproducible for our users. It has also been frustrating for our customer support team to try and solve the issues and has ultimately led to a poor user experience for our players.
With Ad Quality’s user journey feature, our customer support team can review a player’s ad flow, allowing us to inspect and resolve any issues players have seen. We can now address problems that lead to poor user experience, such as redirection out of the app, longer ads, or just bad ads. With this level of transparency, we are able to identify creatives and networks with quality issues and proactively block those ads, resulting in a quicker response time when answering customer support tickets. Powered with this information, we are also encouraged to have conversations with our partners about the ads served within our apps and improve the overall player experience.
Increasing player retention by monitoring churn
Since we advertise competitor apps within our own games, we also often worry about the effects of cannibalization. While it can be difficult to analyze the balance between user churn and high CPM, we are happy that Ad Quality’s churn report allows us to monitor just that and it’s a great benefit to our team.
With the churn report, we can identify which ads and advertisers result in the highest churn in relation to revenue. With this information, we are empowered to make decisions, such as pausing advertisers responsible for high user churn in efforts to improve player retention.
Partnering with the Ad Quality team
We’ve had the pleasure of working with a dedicated and enthusiastic account management team at ironSource, ensuring that we maximize the impact of the product for our UA and ad operations. The team’s commitment to working closely with their clients is evident through their quickness to troubleshoot technical issues, receptiveness to product feedback, and ability to provide additional platform use cases. We are encouraged to share product feedback with our AMs and seeing these changes implemented across the platform has created a strong beneficial partnership. Overall, Ad Quality is an upstanding solution for publishers, giving us a ton of quality features that we haven’t been able to find elsewhere.
