Founded in 2008, Brainium is an independent mobile developer with a portfolio of card and puzzle games.
Read on to learn how Ryan Moloney, Ad Quality and Monetization Manager at Brainium, used Ad Quality by ironSource to improve their games' ad experience while maintaining revenue growth.
Building for long-term player satisfaction
“We develop Solitaire, Sudoku, Mahjong, along with other puzzle games, which are highly competitive categories with relatively high CPIs. That’s why we focus on maximizing our retention, to give us the firepower to continue paying the necessary CPIs and drive sustainable growth and profitability.
Because in-app ads are a meaningful part of our monetization strategy, a crucial factor behind long-term retention is removing low quality advertisers that may cause churn. That’s why we began using ironSource’s Ad Quality solution, which allows us to monitor the ads served in our games, flag bad user-experience (UX) patterns, and block offending advertisers.
Ad Quality by ironSource is also the only tool out there that works across all mediation platforms - important for us as we work with multiple mediation partners across our portfolio of games.”
Reducing user churn with total transparency
“The Ad Quality product has immense value by giving us visibility and the ability to combat bad ad content. Using the creative overview data, we closely track the creatives with bad UX patterns. For instance, the Ad Quality platform automatically flags when an advertiser generates unusually high CTR and accidental clicks - usually a sign of poor UX, such as auto clicking and auto redirects.
We also review the churn rate associated with increases in aggressive creatives to determine if specific advertisers and creatives need to be more closely reviewed and potentially blocked.
As we leveraged these features throughout the year, we saw a massive decrease in negative app store reviews and user complaints in general. This not only helped our ASO and organic installs, but saved our team time responding to unhappy users and identifying the problems.
"Thanks to Ad Quality, we blocked approximately 30 apps and URLs advertising in our games with objectionable content or bad UX patterns a week, all while increasing revenue by 10% throughout the year"
- Ryan Moloney, Ad Quality and Monetization Manager at Brainium
Thanks to Ad Quality, we blocked approximately 30 apps and URLs advertising in our games with objectionable content or bad UX patterns a week, all while increasing revenue by 10% throughout the year. This showed us that Ad Quality is an effective tool to help us achieve our most important metrics - retention and player satisfaction”.
Working with ironSource and future plans
“Everyone on the Ad Quality team at ironSource has been fantastic to work with. I’ve really appreciated that our questions and concerns have been taken seriously and everyone has been responsive.
We’re looking forward to leveraging additional Ad Quality features, specifically the ability to track revenue on a creative level - a unique feature in the market.
We’re also looking forward to the additional reporting capabilities scheduled to be released later in the year. If our past relationship is any indication, the Ad Quality team will continue to be able to address our specific needs and take our feedback into account.”
