THE OBJECTIVE

Playa Games first developed Shakes & Fidget in 2009 as a web based free to play game even before the meteoric rise in mobile gaming. Their midcore RPG with a major funny streak kept players engaged through hilarious 2D animation and witty dialogue, even as the game was adapted to be played cross platform both on web and in a mobile app.

With the dedicated playerbase willing to engage with the Shakes & Fidget content and events over time, Playa Games and their marketing agency Mothership also needed a partner to work with that was on top of ad tech industry trends in the everchanging mobile apps monetization space. Who could they count on to support their mobile ad tech needs today but also move fast enough to adapt as mobile rules of engagement change? 

THE STRATEGY

Already working with DT Offer Wall solution to boost the in-app economy and introduce the benefits of premium virtual currency to players, Mothership Marketing recommended that Playa Games also use the mediation solution in 2015 for their Shakes & Fidget mobile app. FairBid had already established itself as a top mediation platform at the time and in 2018, the technology was rebuilt from scratch incorporating bidding technology from Fyber’s acquisition of Inner-Active just two years prior. This acquisition allowed FairBid to lead in the in-app bidding mediation space and kickstart Playa Games’ adoption of SDK bidding networks, starting with Meta Audience Network. Playa Games continued to add SDK bidding networks into their demand stack to increase ad delivery efficiency and generate higher yield with the support of Digital Turbine’s account management team. 

FairBid enabled Mothership to experiment through Multi-Testing, including bringing on new bidding demand to their stack. With an open mindset around ad settings for continuous optimization, Mothership was able to run successive tests to understand how bringing on SDK bidding networks would impact ARPDAU, CPMs, and latency. The wealth of automation features built for mediated network setup and testing make the experiments with SDK bidding networks intuitive – in the span of 24 months with a stable DAU base, the Mothership team ran consecutive experiments with each one bringing in additional incremental revenue for an ARPDAU growth curve that would make anyone blush. 

In addition to running experiments and easily accessing performance metrics that most monetization managers are already familiar with, the Mothership team was also able to directly reduce the latency experienced when working with waterfall networks by acting on opportunities uncovered through the latency data per instance available in the FairBid console. The waterfall visualization and auction audit tools – also available straight from the FairBid console – made verifying ad monetization changes easy, encouraging additional experimentation to continue growing.