Pixel Federation is a mobile free-to-play game developer based in Slovakia with multiple hit titles and over 80 million downloads.
Producer Michal Hablovic shares how switching from a waterfall setup to in-app bidding with ironSource and Facebook Audience Network on their game Train Station 2 changed their business for the better.
Cutting down tedious tasks
For many of our games at Pixel Federation, we used waterfall setups to manage our monetization and would edit waterfalls on bi-weekly basis. Setting up a new waterfall based on performance data was actually the easy part, and the least time-consuming. The challenge was in creating or renaming instances, setting floors per country, and moving countries between waterfalls.
Real-time bidding has been around for a while and it’s quite obvious that it’s the future for ad monetization. I was eager to try it as soon as possible, so when ironSource reached out to tell us there’s an option to try [tooltip info="ironSource product that opens up developers’ inventory for a real-time bidding auction" url="/in-app-bidding/" btn="Learn more"]LevelPlay in-app bidding[/tooltip] and Facebook Audience Network bidding, we jumped on it.
A smooth transition
The transition to LevelPlay was smooth - ironSource made sure that everything was set up properly and they coordinated integration steps across the board.
For example, before moving our entire inventory over to in-app bidding, we used ironSource’s bidding test tool to see how performance compared between a traditional waterfall and LevelPlay with Facebook Audience Network on our game Train Station 2. The test was simple to set up - in fact, we’re working with around ten ad networks and I’ve found ironSource’s platform to be the most user-friendly in terms of data structure and dashboard usage.
Scaling revenue and saving time
Throughout the bidding test, ironSource sent us daily reports showing the impact of LevelPlay, and by the end of it, the results showed an 11% increase in ARPDAU. That was quite an increase considering the waterfall setup we were using previously was already quite robust.
"The results showed an 11% increase in ARPDAU - quite an increase considering the waterfall setup we were using previously was already quite robust."
- Michal Hablovic, Producer at Pixel Federation
The increase in ARPDAU combined with the fact that LevelPlay was already a much less time-consuming monetization setup than our usual waterfalls, pushed us to move over the rest of our inventory on Train Station 2 completely to in-app bidding.
Talking on a daily basis
In addition to ironSource’s user-friendly platform and all the data they’re able to provide us, good and helpful account management has been key for us. In fact, our teams work together on a daily basis to ensure that our games are performing at top levels.
