Addiktive Games

The context

A game for everyone

Idle Bubbles Cannon is an arcade game developed by Addiktive Games (one-person studio). The game experience proposed is to destroy waves of colored bubbles over more than 1,500 levels.

Addict Mobile has been accompanying this entrepreneur since the start of 2021, by running user acquisition (UA) campaigns aiming at growth and profitability.

Issues

The challenge is in generating a short-term return on investment in order to continue developing the app and adding new content

It should be noted that the revenue comes from the purchases and advertising suggested to players in the app. In addition, our client’s business objectives are twofold:

– Control the acquisition costs (KPI: CPI, CPA)

– Maximize the volume and quality of daily users (KPI: ARPDAU)

The creative is one of the key elements that will allow these two objectives to be achieved.

Strategy

Addict Mobile has produced tens of thousands of creatives over the last few months, to ensure dissemination to over 180 countries and 6 sources.

This massive production is needed to identify the variation that will work best according to various criteria:

– Language

– Font

– Difficulty level

– Music

– Animation effet

– Background

– Story

– Format

– Borders specific to each acquisition source

– Duration

– Hook

– Endcard

To use a concrete example, a raw game phase that we identify as being better performing that the other game phases tested.

Thanks to our internal studio and our tools that allow thousands of adverts to be produced in a few hours, we will make this game phase video available in:

– 3 formats (portrait, landscape, square),

– 3 different languages (English, Japanese and French)

– 3 different musical settings (relaxing, energetic, extremely energetic),

– 3 different video lengths (6 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds).

On the basis of a single game phase, we will therefore find ourselves with 81 varieties that we must test in order to analyze the results, identify the variation that works best, and understand the differentiating factors for future productions.

In order to carry out a test allowing access to statistically reliable data (representative and comparable), while limiting the investment made in these tests, the most common approach is to disseminate adverts among Android users on Facebook. However, other, more gaming-orientated platforms are also highly relevant.

Thanks to our production tools, 24/7 automatic optimization of campaigns and the strategy applied, we manage to identify high-performing adverts quickly and with a limited investment (KPIs: CTR, IPM, ROAS, etc.). These represent less than 0.1% of the adverts produced and 70% of acquired users and revenue

By concentrating the investment on what works best in creative terms, we maximize the interactions with users (like, comment, share, video completion view, etc.), we get the most out of algorithms and increase our capacity for optimization.

This is also an optimum situation for ensuring better management of iOS 14 campaigns. In fact, the feedback from installation postbacks or in-app events operated with sources by Apple does not include the creative parameter, so it is not possible to associate a performance with an advert in a determining fashion. In addition, it is essential to limit the investment being diluted through a multitude of adverts that are more or less performing.

At Addict Mobile, thanks to this strategy, we also manage to limit Ad Fatigue by maintaining a massive and constant production of adverts over time and by diversifying the creative ideas.