Sustaining growth in today’s mobile gaming landscape is increasingly challenging. Balancing player experience, revenue, and user acquisition (UA) costs is a fundamental formula that the most successful studios like XGame master. By leveraging the power of Unity Ads for user acquisition, they’ve taken their return on ad spend (ROAS) performance to new heights.
XGame is a Vietnam-based publisher with more than 150 games and over one billion downloads. Hyper-casual hit titles like Money Run have fueled their success, while deeper casual titles like MiniCraft Village, represent their future.
Discover from their CEO Quyet Phung how the studio increased ROAS and optimized resources by relying on their partnership and insights from Unity Ads.
After six years of growing XGame to become a top studio in Vietnam, Phung is no stranger to partners in the mobile advertising ecosystem. Unity LevelPlay, a leading ad mediation solution, has long been a part of his studio’s monetization success.
Phung explains, “It gives us a smart method to manage and optimize waterfalls and bidding where the result has been increasing revenue by 20–30%.”
As growth continued, user acquisition (UA) efficiency became more important but also more challenging. Finding users with strong retention as well as ensuring accurate creative testing at scale became growing issues.
When the Unity Ads support team proposed retrying ROAS campaigns, with added insights on effective supply sources, Phung saw there was potential to drive more UA efficiency. The scale that Unity Ads’ ROAS campaigns can deliver for publishers was something that aligned well with what XGame was looking for.
“We compare and select sources with high ROAS or retention and then add them to an allow list to boost the performance of other campaigns. This has helped us optimize campaigns that have a 10–20% higher ROAS than those not using allow lists,” Phung says.
Since enjoying success with Unity Ads’ ROAS campaigns, XGame has been able to take their UA strategy to the next level by utilizing a variety of campaign types that help them spend more efficiently throughout every phase of a launch.
“I am really impressed with how Unity Ads generates a variety of campaigns like ROAS, creative testing, and automatic max bid that we can utilize based on testing length or goals. This makes it easier to optimize our resources,” Phung says.
The insights that XGame gets from creative testing have been particularly valuable as they are able to test many formats and scenarios to find the best performing ads.
With so many games in the XGame portfolio, the Unity team suggested the studio take advantage of any unfilled ad inventory they had. Using Unity’s cross-promotion solution, they backfilled their ad placements with promotions for their own games when there were no other ads available to fill them.
“We have a lot of users playing our games, so using cross-promotion helps take advantage of users who installed a similar genre and are from a similar user base. Because of this, these users are high-quality players,” explains Phung.
Since the success of their ROAS campaigns, XGame has come to rely on their Unity Ads support team as an extension of their own capabilities, as Phung shares, “The passionate Unity team has been particularly noteworthy for us. They spend a lot of time enthusiastically supporting improvements and advising on most of our efforts for our main title, MiniCraft Village.”
The collaboration has paid off, too. Since using ROAS campaigns on Unity Ads and working closely with their support team, XGame has seen their share of voice (SOV) for Unity go from 4% to 14%.
If you’re looking for predictable returns on your advertising budget, get started with Unity User Acquisition today to amplify your UA strategy.
