Optimizing ad creation and maximizing ROI with AppsFlyer’s OneLink
Background
Brainium is a product company that makes profits, not a profit company that makes products.
They don’t design by spreadsheet, they design by what plays best. This is the driving principle behind their simple yet wildly successful ethos: To create games that their users love to play. Offering one of the world’s most downloaded Solitaire apps, along with their other popular Sudoku and Mahjong apps, Brainium gives their players the features they want without the clutter.
Brainium titles rely primarily on ad revenue to monetize, with few premium offering or in-app purchases.
Because of this monetization model, Brainium titles focus on long-term engagement, providing a gaming experience that brings users back daily. To do this they must strike a delicate balance between presenting a sufficient number of effective promotions and ads without breaching the trust and quality of experience they have built with their loyal user base that keep them coming back.
Challenge
The primary challenge the Brainium team faced was how to effectively test and measure different creatives for their cross promotions and ads at scale, then easily iterate their strategy based on top performing variable combinations.
Without a readily available deep linking solution, the team was unable to generate a sufficient volume of unique traffic to calculate the impact and success of any combination of creative variables.
Their second challenge was navigating the limitations of their internal ad revenue reporting system.
This system relied on pulling data directly from each advertiser, including DAU and other basic revenue metrics. But a key capability was missing. The team was unable to split revenue into buckets, e.g. revenue from Apple Search Ads users versus revenue from Google Ads users. Instead, they relied on ad revenue in the aggregate.
This prevented Brainium from having a detailed view into the long-tail performance of their campaigns to readily identify which network earned more revenue, which tended to retain users for a longer period, and which provided the highest LTV users.
Solution
The team turned to OneLink, AppsFlyer’s CX and deep linking solution to effectively scale out their creative testing and optimize their campaigns for maximum click-through and engagement.
With OneLink, Brainium could quickly create deep links tagged down to the creative level. This customizability and ease of creation meant they could be granular with their testing to really drill down into different variables. For their newly released Mahjong game, they tested tile sets, backgrounds, and messaging for four key pieces of creative.
To more accurately calculate ad revenue, Brainium combined their internal reporting system with AppsFlyer’s revenue attribution data to produce a comprehensive view of their revenue across networks.
With ad revenue data refreshed daily, the team could report on customer LTV as well as the network that originally acquired the user. They were now easily able to split revenue from Apple Search Ads users versus revenue from Google Ads users, as well as any other ad network they were running.
Michael Chronister, Manager, Advertising and Monetization at Brainium had a few thoughts on the choice of going with AppsFlyer:
Our previous MMP couldn’t deliver the basics in seven months. We jokingly told AppsFlyer that ‘you have seven weeks.’ Two weeks later they had us up and running, from setting up our integrated partners to providing accurate ad revenue.
Results
With easily deployable OneLinks, Brainium could understand which creative combinations for ads and cross promotions led to an increase in customer engagement, retention, and overall volume of installs.
For the first time they had a true one-to-one comparison of creative performance, allowing them to effectively optimize for their desired outcomes.
AppsFlyer’s ad revenue attribution meant they could now see the long-tail picture of campaign performance and quickly optimize for maximum customer LTV. The AppsFlyer dashboard gave Brainium a comprehensive view of their network performance, alerting them to campaign anomalies across all networks.
Overall, Brainium was able to be bolder with their choices knowing that AppsFlyer would identify any hiccups and record all successes.
The AppsFlyer Customer Success team and intuitive product offering was a game changer for them. AppsFlyer’s knowledge base, technical documentation, and industry thought leadership proved invaluable.
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