Ruby Labs is a mobile app company based in the UK. Their app Astrology & Palmistry Coach is the number 3 lifestyle app on the iOS store.
Pavel Skorodumov is the Senior User Acquisition Manager at Ruby Labs. Read his story to learn how the user acquisition team at Ruby Labs works with ironSource to scale app growth.
Scaling in a competitive market
The mobile app market in the US is highly saturated, which makes it difficult for app companies like us at Ruby Labs to stand out from the competition - especially since our target audience isn’t too niche, females 18-55.
So to make sure we’re able to scale, we run user acquisition campaigns on multiple ad networks. However, we’ve found that most of the networks hide source names, are unavailable to help with creatives or have too long of a queue, and are slow to respond to our questions.
Scaling with playables
Once we started working with ironSource, we got access to their in-house creative studio, Playworks. Playworks worked closely with us to design and build interactive end cards and playables ads for our app Astrology & Palmistry Coach - something we hadn't done before, and isn’t such a straightforward task for non-gaming apps.
The creatives were a massive success for our campaigns - IPM was high for our category and increased more than 20%, and we’re continuing to increase CTR and scale each day. The high IPM of the creatives we worked on together helped us to be much more competitive in the US.
"The high IPM of the creatives we worked on together helped us to be much more competitive in the US."
- Pavel Skorodumov, Senior User Acquisition Manager at Ruby Labs
Sometimes, companies like us can’t build all types of creatives in-house, and so ironSource’s help here is super important for our continued growth.
Expanding our growth opportunities
In addition to expanding our creatives to playables and interactive end cards, the ironSource team helped us find new growth opportunities outside the US, showing us benchmark reports for other markets. They also help us understand the traffic and give us best practices to grow certain campaigns and sources.
At Ruby Labs, we’re pro-testing, and always open to experimenting with our user acquisition strategy. I’m a strong believer that if you test a lot of creatives and targeting settings, your campaigns will perform well. So for every best practice, recommendation, and tip ironSource shares - we always make sure to test it and measure its performance. Since we share post-install events with ironSource, we also get a better understanding of user quality. We’re able to see, for example, that we found great supply on ironSource’s network.
In fact, since January, we’ve increased installs several times over as well as ROAS D7 on the ironSource network - thanks to the creatives and all of the best practices the ironSource teams share with us on a regular basis.
We work with a lot of ad networks at Ruby Labs, but ironSource is the most open partner for us and I have a very close relationship with the team there. Based on the success we’ve had with ironSource, we’re now planning to test their ROAS optimizer, and hope it’ll bring us even more scale and quality.
"We work with a lot of ad networks at Ruby Labs, but ironSource is the most open partner for us."
- Pavel Skorodumov, Senior User Acquisition Manager at Ruby Labs
