Bombay Play is a Bangalore-based game studio with hits like Pokemon Tower Battle and 29.
Abhas Saroha, co-founder at Bombay Play, talks about his experience using LevelPlay in-app bidding for their game Card Party! and how it boosted ARPDAU 20% on both iOS and Android.
Bringing bidding to Bombay Play
Before working with the ironSource team and making waterfall changes, ads represented just 20% of our total revenue and earned a 10% engagement rate. With these results, we felt like we weren’t getting as much revenue as we could from our campaigns, and our waterfall was taking more and more time to manage as we tried to build it out for our different global audiences.
The waterfall dilemma
With all the setup and optimization we were having to do, the time we were spending on the waterfall was getting overwhelming. Plus, it was taking away from the time we could otherwise be spending on improving our game and handling other parts of the operation.
The most complicated parts of our traditional waterfall were adding new demand sources, A/B testing, and optimizing eCPMs. These issues made it increasingly difficult for us to manage our monetization strategy and prevented us from getting the best results. The operational overhead became so much that we had to have a designated person on the team manually managing the traditional waterfall. As a small studio, this was a big expense that meant diverting resources from other parts of the business. And, even with this person keeping tabs on our monetization, the entire process of setting up the waterfall, optimizing eCPMs, and scaling was becoming too time-consuming and required too much overhead.
With more games coming through the pipeline, we needed an alternate solution. So, we started looking into in-app bidding.
Scale, revenue, automation to achieve +20% ARPDAU
After learning more aboutLevelPlay, we ran a bidding test and were able to quickly give our ARPDAU a 20% uplift. The test was fast and simple to set up, and seeing that the bidding group performed better, we decided to move all of our traffic to bidding.
"The test was fast and simple to set up, and after seeing that the bidding group performed better, we decided to move all of our traffic to bidding."
- Abhas Saroha, co-founder at Bombay Play
After making the switch, we were easily able to add new demand sources, introduce competition that helped boost ARPDAU, and automatically optimize our entire monetization strategy. Doing all of this ensured we weren’t missing out on any revenue streams. Since our bidder went live, we’ve experienced a 20% increase in ARPDAU and revenue continues to grow.
The way the system works with an open and fair bidding process, any solution that you can come up with would be suboptimal compared to the bidding process. And, automating everything meant we could devote more time to other parts of the operation, like our UA strategy.
"Since our bidder went live, we’ve experienced a 20% increase in ARPDAU and revenue continues to grow."
- Abhas Saroha, co-founder at Bombay Play
Applying these lessons to the future
With our next game, Lockdown Brawl, coming out soon, we’re excited to get started right away with in-app bidding and applying what we learned from Card Party!. Specifically, this means adding more demand sources to the ironSource mediation platform and focusing on the KPIs (like retention and engagement) that we didn’t have time to optimize before we switched to an automated bidding model.
We’ve been fortunate to get personal attention from the ironSource team in Bangalore. They’ve been super helpful in answering our questions, giving their insights, and keeping us up-to-date with the latest updates to the platform.
By moving away from traditional waterfall management using LevelPlay, we also boosted our efficiency. Now, we are using in-app bidding for all of our games and scaling in a smart way that’s backed by real performance data.
+20%
ARPDAU
