About
Mail.ru Group uses ironSource mediation for the games it develops and publishes for mobile, PC, and consoles. Mail.ru Group’s extensive gaming portfolio reaches 512 million players worldwide and includes hit mobile games like WarRobots, Hustle Castle, HAWK: Freedom Squadron, and Left to Survive.
Dmitry Kovalenko is Head of Ad Platforms at Mail.ru Group. Read on to see how his team uses ironSource’s impression level revenue tool to boost user acquisition campaigns.
An incomplete picture of ROI
For the last several years, Mail.ru Group has been using a proprietary tracking platform called myTracker which we developed in house and made public for the mobile developer community. The platform provides attribution data and shows how much revenue we spend across ad sources, as well as how much money we earned.
In order to optimize our user acquisition campaigns, we rely on predicted ROI. We developed several models to predict in-app purchase ROI, so that within 3 or 4 days after a user installs the game, we already know how much money the user will generate during their lifetime.
Though most of Mail.ru Group’s mobile games are in-app purchase based, we also use ad monetization. However, we didn’t always have the same deep insight into our ad revenue data, which is why we were only optimizing our campaigns towards IAP revenue. Of course, this left a major gap in our user acquisition optimization - while we knew, for example, that ad revenue was X% of a game’s total revenue, we didn’t know which campaigns or users delivered that X%.
Accurate impression level revenue
Once ironSource released its impression level revenue, we were quick to integrate it with myTracker via their API. As a result we could connect users who generate revenue via ads to the specific UA campaigns and channels - as well as use an automated prediction on total LTV, based on both ad revenue and in-app purchase revenue.
Reaching positive ROI
Looking at myTracker revenue dashboards and reports, now our user acquisition team was able to put more spend behind high ad revenue generating sources, some of which seemed unprofitable before we added the ad revenue. For example, we could see that some of the campaigns generate 50% ad revenue and 50% in-app purchase revenue - meaning this campaign was generating twice as much revenue than we saw before, enabling us to scale the campaign and still hit our target ROI.
This was especially true for acquiring more high-quality offerwall users - their share from our total audience is rather small, but they bring a rather big share of ad revenue. It’s crucial for us to access their ad revenue data, so we can acquire them more efficiently, as by measuring ad revenue data on the user level for our offerwall audience, we could pinpoint the best ad sources to double down on.
Ultimately, combining ironSource’s impression level revenue together with myTracker’s predictions helps us see the full value of a player and accurately measure the results of our UA campaigns. This, in its turn, helped us significantly increase our ROIs and scale up some of our UA campaigns by several times.
"Combining ironSource’s impression level revenue together with myTracker’s predictions ... helped us significantly increase our ROIs and scale up some of our UA campaigns by several times."
- Dmitry Kovalenko, Head of Ad Platforms at Mail.ru Group
