Ludia was founded in Montreal 12 years ago and is one of Canada's leading mobile game companies. Their portfolio includes original games based on famous IPs such as Jurassic World: The Game, Dragons: Rise of Berk and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Legends. Read on to hear Ludia’s senior marketing specialist, Rose Agozzino, explain how migrating part of their portfolio to ironSource’s mediation platform helped the IAP-focused developer optimize their ad monetization.
The challenge
Ludia is an IAP-driven developer, so we were under-optimized when it came to ad revenue. We recognized the potential incremental revenue uplift ads could provide us, but because our monetization team is small, we didn’t have the resources to manage many instances and waterfalls. Instead, we sought out an easy-to-manage mediation platform that would both increase our ad revenue and save us time.
The solution
When it came to finding a mediation service, it was really important for us to find one that would not only benefit our bottom line immediately but could help grow our future games. After learning about ironSource’s platform, specifically its ease-of-use and bidding solution, we were confident that it would help us achieve our short-term and long-term goals.
In-app bidding
Our first priority after migrating our ad operations to ironSource’s mediation was to grow ad revenues across our portfolio of games.
To that end, we decided to test out LevelPlay, ironSource’s in-app bidding solution. After running A/B tests with the ironSource team to determine the impact of LevelPlay on our profits (we began testing on July 22 and ended on September 4, as shown in the chart below), we decided to combine bidding with our traditional waterfalls. This hybrid approach automated much of our operations while boosting eCPMs, in other words - saving us more time and increasing our revenue.
Our game, Dragons: Rise of Berk (Android), is a good example of this revenue boost: we saw ad ARPDAU jump 87% between July and September, as shown below:
With the success of this game using ironSource’s mediation platform and bidding solution, we’ve migrated others over as well, including Jurassic World and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Legends. The results were impressive: we saw ad revenues increase 100% for Jurassic World: The Game - and we saw a 10x increase in ad revenue (primarily rewarded video ads) for Ninja Turtles: Legends.
Being able to aggregate all the networks through ironSource and having the system decide the best network to serve the impression at any given time - without needing frequent development work from us - allowed us to tap into revenue that we were missing out on before. In fact, we’ve seen a 2x increase in overall revenue since switching to ironSource’s mediation.
A/B testing
We’re eager to keep up the growth we’ve seen and experiment with other tools available on ironSource’s mediation. In particular, we’re excited to expand our usage of the A/B testing tool - for IAP-heavy developers like ourselves, the main concern is ads cannibalizing our IAP revenue. The main challenge in this is figuring out the smartest ad placements in our games.
As we migrate more titles from our portfolio to the ironSource platform, we’re planning to set up A/B tests for different segments based on player behavior and for frequency and capping of our ad placements. Ultimately, this will help us improve the user experience with our games and ensure we find the sweet spot for ad and IAP monetization.
Working with ironSource
We’ve received great support from the ironSource team throughout the whole integration and setup process, which has made onboarding a breeze. The interface is easy to use, and the team has been absolutely amazing to work with.
