GMRD Apps Limited develops educational apps that allow users to train their brains for just a few minutes every day. With over 10 million users, their app Impulse offers a diverse range of personalized workout plans for different brain areas - memory, attention, concentration, mental math, problem-solving, creativity, etc. - as well as science-inspired brain games and puzzles.
Read on to learn how Yevhenii Kostenetskyi, Founder & CEO at Impulse, and the team monetized with ironSource interstitials to increase their app’s LTV around 40%.
Looking for new growth opportunities
From the beginning, we knew that Impulse was a strong concept with high business potential. Despite our confidence in the app idea, we also knew we needed a way to maximize LTV to survive in the educational app category. After all, relying on subscriptions alone meant that non-paying users brought little value to our business.
That’s why we started implementing ads through a mediation platform - to optimize each of our ad impressions and ensure we weren’t leaving any money on the table. Despite access to tons of ad networks, we weren’t happy with the amount of revenue we were generating from each user and our team was struggling to optimize our monetization setup.
That’s when we began searching for a new mediation platform that would open doors to new growth opportunities. ironSource, for example, offered in-app bidding, which would allow us to optimize performance and automate our monetization processes. Friends and colleagues had also shared positive feedback about monetizing with ironSource.
Implementing interstitials with ironSource
We implemented the ironSource SDK in February 2021. While we were worried that implementing interstitial ads may cause users to leave our app, we wanted to diversify our monetization strategy with more ad units. We began showing our non-subscribing users interstitials ads at natural pauses in the user experience, such as in between levels or in between games - each game has a different number of levels. For example, we have a “daily brain workout” with 3-5 brain games, so showing ads in between these games is a great way to monetize without disrupting the user experience. We also have many free brain exercises to play, and mind puzzles to solve, in addition to the daily workouts, which are also monetized with interstitials.
We tested the amount of ads we show to find our sweet spot. Our goal was to maximize LTV without damaging retention and the user experience. We found that showing users around 6 ads per day would give us significant performance boosts while keeping our users in our app. We intend to continue testing the amount of ads we show to ensure we are getting the most out of our ad placements.
Considering one of our top priorities is to keep all of our users happy, not just paying users, it’s great that with ironSource, users can clearly find where to skip or close an ad when it’s finished.
Boosting Impulse’s LTV around 40%
Since monetizing every non-premium user with ironSource interstitials, ARPDAU and eCPM are at all time highs. These results have led to around a 40% uplift in our LTV compared to monetizing only with subscriptions, which allows us to be more competitive with our UA strategy and scale up.
"Working with the team at ironSource is a mutually beneficial relationship"
- Yevhenii Kostenetskyi, Founder & CEO at Impulse
When we do encounter issues with the platform, the customer support team is quick to respond and fix the problems we’re having. In such a fast paced industry, we value how proactive our account manager is about proposing new tests and discussing new opportunities that may benefit our performance. We’re also encouraged and comfortable sharing any suggestions we have about the platform.
Overall, we are very happy with our results from implementing interstitial ads with ironSource, especially as a subscription app.
