ITI is a game publisher based in Japan.
Their portfolio includes 1000+ mobile games, 100 of which made it to the App Store top charts, including the popular Golf Nest.
The challenge
Japanese game developers are utilizing ad monetization more than ever before. This is a significant shift, one that moves away from an IAP-centric ecosystem, towards a space where mobile gamers are more willing to interact with ads. The mobile gaming space in Japan has finally realized the true potential of ad monetization, and how it’s an effective method of growing and scaling their businesses.
ironSource recently started working with ITI Inc, a Japanese mobile gaming publisher that was established in 2012. Up until last year, they were solely developing apps for the Japanese market, however in 2018 they released their first for the international market, Mr GoHome, but with minimal success.
The solution
In June, ITI switched to the ironSource mediation platform to employ the full breadth of impression level revenue and launched a new app outside of Japan, Golf Nest. Within a week of launch, ITI adapted their goals using ironSource’s ROAS optimizer and hit an IPM of 49. Following this high, ITI began to utilize creative optimization.
“After just a day using the ironSource ROAS optimizer, we saw our user acquisition traffic double. Now the optimizer is a default tool for all our campaigns.”
- Kosei Saegusa, ITI Inc
By taking into account the in-ad data points from interactive end cards (IEC), they were able to iterate their IECs in order to improve scale. The next step was to amend instances on the waterfall to ensure that the networks that performed best ranked the highest.
The results
As you can see from the two graphs below, the LTV curve shows how ad-based games have a large diversity in ARPU of users and so should be treated differently. Our impression level revenue solution gave the Golf Nest team full transparency on total LTV per user, per ad source.
With these insights, they were able to utilize the ironSource ROAS Optimizer to work out the optimal bid and to dynamically bid, every day, for each source, according to the actual ARPU of their users, enabling them to scale at the rate that they did.
ironSource’s ad network drove two-thirds of Golf Nest’s installs. And as of today, Golf Nest has close to 1.5M downloads and 220K DAU.
