Leverage myTarget to achieve 2 million installs of your midcore game: Adsup case

As part of a circa year-long campaign, the team planned to deliver the following results:

• at least 4,000 installs per day;
  
• retention rate of at least 25% on day 2after install;
  
• loyal user rate of at least 18% for the same period;
  
• average revenue per user (ARPU) of at least USD 1 on day 30 after install.

Selecting the target audience, among other things, is key for achieving your business goals. Adsup used audience analysis and its extensive expertise to segment the audience into two main groups:

• males aged 18–45 playing strategy games;
  
• fans of survival, post-apocalyptic and strategy games.
  

To effectively build its audience, the agency took advantage of the lookalike technique to target users that share the characteristics of its existing customer base and make in-game purchases.

The technique relies on machine learning to reach out to a wider audience likely to get converted. Smart algorithms assess anonymized attributes of the advertizer's audience seed to select a lookalike user segment.

This tool helped find users with the same interests, geography, gender, and other relevant parameters. The team also assumed that users in these segments had been active in similar apps.

Adsup launched several campaigns designed to test various approaches.

The following tactics proved to be most effective:

• showing defences and weapons and their upgrade from a basic to advanced level;
  
• showing an emotion-charged gamer at play;
  
• showing battles

Each of these tactics brought in some high-quality traffic.

By applying CPI to narrow the funnel, Adsup fully achieved its targets.

Ads featuring weapon upgrades prompted users to make more purchases in the in-game store. As a result, the team exceeded its ARPU target, albeit with a slightly lower quality of new users (loyal rate – 15%; retention rate – 22%).

Ads with the gamer image helped meet the ARPU target by 50%. As for traffic quality metrics, retention and loyal user rates were 18% and 13%, respectively.

Finally, battle ads demonstrated the following results:

• loyal rate – 17%;
  
• retention rate – 25%;
  
• ARPU target achieved by 80%.
  

This means that by running myTarget ad campaigns in Russia and the CIS Adsup gained high-quality traffic and 2 million installs. Other important advantages of bringing in new users were an even workload of the game server and no in-game bugs.