Pixelberry Studios is a California-based studio with over 10 years of experience designing story-based mobile games. Their title, Choices: Stories You Play, has reached the top 25 on iOS, and follows their tradition of building unique games with meaningful gameplay that promote awareness through narrative storytelling.
Carissa Gonzalez, Head of Marketing and Ad Monetization at Pixelberry, talks about her experience leveraging ironSource LevelPlay to manage and optimize their monetization strategy. Taking advantage of the mediation platform features and the recommendations from the ironSource team led to an ARPDAU increase of 32% across both Android and iOS - here’s the story behind their success.
Balancing IAPs and ads
Originally, our revenue from Choices: Stories You Play was heavily driven by in-app purchases. Though we do run in-app advertising, we had limited resources to dedicate towards building out our ad monetization strategy and as a result, only ran on a few networks.
We recognized our monetization strategy wasn’t fully optimized - we were missing opportunities with other networks and didn’t have the resources to manually optimize our current waterfalls.
Working together to optimize the hybrid waterfall
Seeing an opportunity for us to increase revenue and access more advertisers, the ironSource team gave us recommendations on top-performing ad networks and bidders that were missing from our stack and would improve our ARPDAU. Adding more networks and bidders to our hybrid waterfall helped us reach a wider selection of advertisers, increasing competition and driving higher ARPDAU. Along the way, the ironSource team helped us resolve any QA and technical issues.
"Adding more networks and bidders to our hybrid waterfall helped us reach a wider selection of advertisers, increasing competition and driving higher ARPDAU"
- Carissa Gonzalez, Head of Marketing and Ad Monetization at Pixelberry
We also optimized our hybrid waterfall based on the ironSource team’s suggestions. For example, they shared best practices around which networks could make the biggest impact on different parts of the waterfall. Sharing these opportunities allowed us to focus more time on optimizations that made a significant impact.
Reaching more users, monetizing them effectively
With all of the support and suggestions from the ironSource team, as well as the addition of in-app bidding, we successfully optimized our ad monetization strategy. Overall, ARPDAU increased 32% across both iOS and Android throughout Q4 as a result of the changes we made on LevelPlay.
Monetization made easy
Managing monetization through the mediation platform was super easy and convenient - it didn’t require any extra resources or put a strain on our team. In fact, it let us focus on other parts of the operation like improving our IAP strategy.
"Managing monetization through the mediation platform was super easy and convenient"
- Carissa Gonzalez, Head of Marketing and Ad Monetization at Pixelberry
Working with the ironSource team was an excellent experience at every step. They provided us with their expert recommendations and unending support from onboarding through to optimizing. We know we can count on them to help us continue maximizing our game’s revenue and get the most out of LevelPlay.
