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 mid-core 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 player base 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 ever-changing 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
While already leveraging 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 utilize a mediation solution for their Shakes & Fidget mobile app in 2015. DT FairBid has already established itself as a top mediation platform at the time and in 2018, the technology was rebuilt from scratch incorporating innovative bidding technology. This allowed DT FairBid to lead 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.
DT 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.
The Solution
In addition to running experiments and easily accessing performance metrics, the Mothership team was also able to directly reduce the latency experienced when working with waterfall networks. Monetization managers were able to act on opportunities uncovered through the latency data per instance available in the DT FairBid console. DT FairBid’s waterfall visualization and auction audit tools made verifying ad monetization changes easy, encouraging additional experimentation to continue growing.
The Results
The automation and testing tools offered by DT FairBid helped Playa Games achieve 81% ARPDAU growth over two years and a 276% increase in monthly ad revenue for Shakes & Fidget.
“Multi-Testing has helped streamline our A/B testing process, enabling us to continuously run tests and easily roll out changes to 100% of our traffic once we identify the stronger performing variant,” said Christian Hofbauer, General Manager of Mothership Marketing GMBH.
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