x5.5 Installs by scaling x3 the Ad Spend - Join Blocks Success

Sometimes, when you want to grow your game’s metrics, spending more money doesn’t get more installs. There may be many situations that may deter you from growing your business, and NewPubCo, a game studio developing casual games, learned that the hard way.

This is why Vlad Gurgov decided to consult with the performance experts at Appodeal. After a thorough analysis, we detected how to improve NewPubCo’s situation, and optimized their ad performance campaigns.

By the next month, JoinBlocks metrics rocketed:

In this success story, we will dive deep into how Appodeal achieved such a great outcome.

NewPubCo, one of our top successful game studios from the Accelerator Program, had solid metrics in some of their best-performing User Acquisition campaigns.

The studio wanted to scale its mobile game, Join Blocks, and boost its installs. For that, they launched a whole new UA Strategy, increasing their ad spend by x3.5 times.

The expected outcome? To get, at least, triple the installs.

However, after one month, the results were far from the established objectives. Installs were, growing only by x1.9 times. The rest of the metrics also plummeted.

When JoinBlocks’ team saw their metrics downfall, as members of the Appodeal Accelerator Program, requested support from Appodeal performance experts.

Once we analyzed the situation, we found out that NewPubCo initially had one paid UA campaign that was delivering good results. To scale it further, we replicated the settings of that specific ad campaign, and made slight variations to A/B test different ideas.

✅ Best Practice Tip: Create multiple UA campaigns to better segment and profile your audience. This will allow you to optimize the targeting of your ads.

We created +30 UA Campaigns testing different optimizations, audiences, markets & creatives. That was the required amount to start detecting which combinations of ads performed better. By testing new ad creatives, user segments, different geos, and CPI's, we found the soft spots to achieve the desired growth.

Some campaigns with poor metrics were optimized to further enhance their reach, and some others that underperformed were completely deactivated.

One step after another, we defined a new UA strategy to scale JoinBlocks ad spend.

A month after appodeal took the lead on the performance campaigns, the results were visible: The Appodeal strategy brought x5.5 more installs to JoinBlocks!

✅ Best Practice Tip: Be careful when duplicating active campaigns! When you have many paid campaigns, targeting the same audience, you may compete against yourself, and the CPI (cost of the campaign) gets artificially inflated. This is what is called "UA Cannibalization".

Having a UA Campaign with a low ad spend usually brings great metrics. The tricky thing is to scale it while maintaining good eROAS and retention Rates.

This is why we always must dive deep into the charts.

When we did, we realized that before any paid campaigns, the eROAS on Day 365 was an outstanding 250%. This means that every user, on average was bringing x2.5 times more money versus the cost of acquiring it.

When NewPubCo set up their ad campaigns, however, that same metric plummeted below the “100%” threshold -meaning that the cost of acquisition was higher than the revenue generated-.

Thanks to the intervention of Appodeal and its new performance strategy to acquire new users, Join Blocks was back on track, with a whopping 200% eROAS on Day 365.

✅ Pro Tip: eROAS on Day 365 is a metric that predicts the performance of the acquired users, a year from now. When 100%, means that you’re losing money.

We also analyzed the short term-impact in other metrics, such as “ROAS on Day 7” and “Retention Rate”. As one may expect, we found a similar trend to the previous metric.

In the previous chart we can observe how, thanks to the efforts of Appodeal, JoinBlocks was able to scale its UA Campaigns while keeping high ROAS & Retention Rates.

In the latter metric (retention), we even increased the effectiveness of the campaigns, by +25%.