Vietnam-based mobile game studio IEC Games is best known for its snackable puzzle games, with over 600M downloads between them. Recently, the studio was looking to explore new ways to grow their Water Sort Puzzle title.
IEC Games had established a robust partnership with the team at Unity LevelPlay. They mentioned that they were looking to diversify their UA, so the team introduced them to the on-device advertising solution, Aura from Unity. Hear from Đàm Thị Kim Oanh, UA Manager at IEC Games, on how they leveraged Aura from Unity’s placements and Scale Optimizer to boost D7 ROAS by 41%.
A unique solution at a cost-effective rate
We were first introduced to Aura from Unity by the team at Unity LevelPlay. At the time, with increasing CPI on traditional channels, we were looking for a new way to grow our Water Sort Puzzle title while maintaining our ROAS targets, particularly for the US. Aura sounded like the perfect solution - providing the scale we needed, packaged in a unique solution at a cost-effective rate.
Running on all of Aura’s placements
We started running on all of Aura’s placements: the App Discovery Experience (both Unboxing and In-Life), Game Spotlights, and Swipe Selection. This enabled us to reach users directly on their devices in all of the moments they were most likely to engage (like when they were first setting up their devices for the Unboxing Experience). We were also now able to reach users with native placements (In-Life Discovery) and personalized app recommendations (like the opt-in subscription service for games, and Game Spotlights).
At the start, the Aura team was manually running our campaigns using our CPI benchmarks. We saw good results, but the team at Aura was adamant we could improve performance even further.
A 41% D7 ROAS increase with the Scale Optimizer
The team recommended we switch from manual benchmarks to the Scale Optimizer, a tool that would use machine learning to adjust our campaigns to optimize performance automatically. We were initially skeptical - we had strict ROAS KPIs that we needed to maintain and were concerned that changing the CPI benchmarks would negatively impact them.
But we agreed to experiment with the tool and the results made it clear we’d made the right call. We saw a 10% increase in ROAS for our Scale Optimizer campaign compared to our non-optimizer campaign. Though this came with a slight increase in CPI, we decided to move forward with the Scale Optimizer. With it, we achieved a 41% increase in D7 ROAS with Aura.
Expanding our partnership to all of our titles
Since first partnering with Aura on Water Sort Puzzle, we’ve expanded our partnership to include all our titles. Aura proved to be a solution that delivers, both in terms of performance and expertise - it was thanks to their team that we experimented with the Scale Optimizer, which played a big part in our success. We look forward to our continued partnership with Aura.
