The free-to-play game publisher Tilting Point, which helps independent game developers scale up their games, is well known for its portfolio of hits like Star Trek Timelines, SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest, and Narcos: Cartel Wars.
Tilting Point partnered with ironSource to fuel growth on both the UA and monetization front across their portfolio. Read on to see how Tilting Point did exactly that using the full suite of solutions within the ironSource platform, from their Monetization Manager, Noelia Lopez.
In-app bidding
With such high-profile IPs in our arsenal, it’s critical we fulfill their considerable revenue potential and earn a healthy return on our investments. That’s why we focused on finding an in-app bidding solution that would enable us to meet our monetization KPIs - which led us to ironSource.
"Using ironSource’s full suite of solutions helped us maximize the value the platform provided and we look forward to continuing this partnership"
Noelia Lopez, Monetization Manager at Tilting Point
After integrating ironSource’s mediation platform SDK, we ran a quick bidding test to determine if bidding actually increases ARPDAU for our games. Because ironSource connects to a large number of bidding networks, we managed to tap into strong demand for our ad space and the results from the A/B test were positive. We were confident enough to adopt bidding across all our biggest apps.
As a result, we’ve seen an uplift in ARPDAU across the board - in Star Trek Timelines and SpongeBob for instance, ARPDAU jumped by 20% and 10% respectively. The chart below shows the ARPDAU uplift we saw during the bidding A/B test we ran for Star Trek.
Because we invest plenty of resources into continuously improving our apps and running live ops events, using in-app bidding enables us to save time through automation and dedicate more resources to creating and optimizing a successful live ops strategy.
Cross promotion
Thanks to the success we’ve seen using ironSource’s growth tools on the monetization side, we also wanted to leverage ironSource’s UA solutions. For example, in order to acquire new users cost-effectively, we’re launching cross promotion ad campaigns through the ironSource platform. ironSource’s cross promotion solution lets us advertise to users from other apps within our own ecosystem of games - an especially savvy tactic in the post-IDFA era.
ROAS optimizer
To further optimize our UA activity, the ironSource team advised us to try out their ROAS optimizer tool - the promise of an automated, highly optimized bidding process was too appealing to ignore.
We used the optimizer tool for Narcos: Idle Cartel, which enabled us to unlock a new level of scale of installs from high-quality users, boosting ARPU and profitability in turn. In addition, the optimizer reduced our manual overheads that went into optimizing certain ad campaigns, with the deep machine learning doing all the heavy lifting for us.
Creative management
To ensure the optimizer is as effective as possible, it’s also key to use high impact, optimized ad creatives - and ironSource’s creative management team provided us with what we needed to do that.
For example, ironSource made a playable ad with an interactive end card for Narcos: Cartel Wars. The team understood that our users are attracted to the characters of the game, and designed the creative in a way that really brought the characters to the forefront of users’ attention.
In addition, to ensure the playable was as intuitive as possible, the ironSource team inserted an arrow that instructed users what to tap and when in order to complete the mission. The optimization efforts the creative team made to this ad helped it achieve an IPM 75% stronger than the benchmark for the strategy mobile game genre.
This combination of deep machine learning and algorithms with the optimizer and cross promotion, with human creativity and expertise through the ad creative management team, enables us to meet our UA KPIs and continue growth on the monetization side. Using ironSource’s full suite of solutions helped us maximize the value the platform provided and we look forward to continuing this partnership.
