Based in Vietnam, Falcon Game Studio has a portfolio of 50+ games that have achieved over 500 million installs, establishing them among the top Southeast Asian developers. For their game 1945 Air Force, Falcon relied on ironSource LevelPlay to improve their monetization and UA strategies. By utilizing the mediation platform’s vast array of features and working closely with the ironSource team, they succeeded in increasing ARPDAU on Android by 87%, doubling their scale, and boosting LTV by 40%.
Here, Linh Nguyen, Chief Marketing Officer at Falcon, shares her experience using LevelPlay to acquire high-quality users at scale and optimize their monetization strategy.
Manually bidding on high-quality users
As we began scaling 1945 Air Force, our goal was to reach higher quality users who we could effectively monetize. This meant improving both our UA and monetization strategies - we needed to acquire the right users then give them a great ad experience to boost revenue. But we were running into some challenges.
On the UA side, we were manually adjusting our bids, which wasn’t completely efficient - not only were we spending too much time on manual optimizations, taking time away from other parts of our operation, we were also wasting money on apps that didn’t reach our target users.
"We needed a solution that could help us improve the quality of our users and optimize our monetization strategy in an efficient way."
- Linh Nguyen, Marketing Manager at Falcon
It was also getting harder to monetize the lower quality users that we were spending so much time and so many resources on acquiring. We needed a solution that could help us improve the quality of our users and optimize our monetization strategy in an efficient way.
Leveraging the power of LevelPlay to double scale and boost ARPDAU
With the ironSource team’s guidance and support, we took advantage of some key features in their LevelPlay mediation platform that helped us address our quality, scale, and revenue challenges.
To optimize our monetization strategy and maximize revenue, the ironSource team worked closely with us to ensure we were making the most of the monetization benefits that LevelPlay offers. Taking advantage of these monetization features on the mediation led to some incredible results - overall, we increased ARPDAU by 55% on iOS and by 87% on Android.
For example:
- They helped us add new networks to our monetization stack, which over 5 months increased our ARPDAU by 25%
- At the ironSource team’s suggestion, we also introduced a new ad unit - offerwall ads. Doing so generated a revenue uplift of 15% without affecting the performance of our other ad units, like rewarded video and interstitial
Now that we had a solid monetization strategy in place that was generating more revenue from our users, we were ready to fine tune our user acquisition. That’s when we also began running the ROAS optimizer, which automatically scaled our campaign by adjusting our bids so we’re reaching the right users for the right price.
As it ran, the ironSource team made tweaks according to our KPIs so we could meet our revenue goals and still scale. We no longer needed to spend our time and resources making manual adjustments to our campaign, and the optimizer expanded the number of apps we bid on. Placing the right bid on more apps enabled us to reach a higher quantity and quality of users without spending more than needed, which was clear in the results: we achieved 2x more scale and boosted ARPU by 40% on Android - all while keeping CPI stable.
Plans for the future
The reporting capabilities, great UX, and features available on LevelPlay are even more reasons - besides the impressive performance results - we’re continuing to use the platform for our new game launches. With the mediation and the convenient ironSource mobile app that lets us take data from the platform on the go, we have an ever-expanding toolkit at our disposal for analyzing and optimizing our UA and monetization strategies.
"The reporting capabilities, great UX, and features available on LevelPlay are even more reasons we’re continuing to use the platform for our new game launches."
- Linh Nguyen, Marketing Manager at Falcon
We’re excited to continue collaborating closely with the ironSource team and taking full advantage of the LevelPlay platform.