About The UA Campaign

Unico Studio is a leading mobile game development company whose primary aim is to reach game players across the globe and provide a medium for endless gaming discovery and enjoyment. Unico recently partnered with InMobi to promote their popular game Brain Test: Tricky Puzzles via InMobi DSP. In particular, they wanted to drive user acquisition at scale while maintaining the cost per install and quality of the installs driven by maximizing the app’s ROAS (return on ad spend). Unico Studio tasked InMobi DSP with delivering a high volume of installs across major geographies such as the U.S., Brazil and Mexico at a lower cost per user acquired.

Campaign Strategy: Targeting

Through InMobi DSP’s advanced machine learning-based bidder, the campaign leveraged an always-on feedback loop of unique contextual signals and engagement patterns. In addition, InMobi DSP’s pricing engine helped them reach lookalike audiences with the highest propensity to convert. Driving users down the marketing funnel was a key strategy for the campaign. Clickers, or those users who clicked on a Brain Test ad once already, were seen as high intent users who should be retargeted for conversion. In addition, InMobi continually looked at the best-performing supply throughout the campaign. This ensured that Unico Studio’s ads appeared in apps where their best-performing audiences were present.

Campaign Strategy: Creative

InMobi’s in-house creative building capability was leveraged to mimic the gameplay, with the sole objective to engage the user within the ad. Proactive creative experimentation and A/B testing was conducted to improve IPMs (installs per 1,000 impressions) on a week-on-week basis. A creative refresh cycle of two weeks was established to avoid creative fatigue.

Campaign Results

The campaign was overall a huge success, helping Unico Studio see noticeable boosts in IPMs. For example, using a social appeal boosted ROAS by 10x, while adding gameplay to banner ads led to a 15% increase in IPMs. Further, adding audio to interactive video ads led to a 90% IPM uplift, while display ads with a quiz drove a measurable boost in IPMs.

Additionally, users acquired from gameplay videos showed 1.8x better lifetime value (LTV) when compared to non-gameplay videos. While the ROAS on non-gameplay videos was 28%, the ROAS on gameplay videos was 50%.

Overall, display and video ads IPMs incrementally improved, with an average uplift of 200%. Interactive units worked best across display and video formats, with an average IPM uplift of 20%. As a result of various creative experiments, InMobi was able to improve IPMs by 136% on display and 31% on video formats.